


Darkness on the Edge of Town

by ash818



Series: Legacy [8]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Crime Fighting, F/M, Family, Family Feels, Future Fic, Gen, Kid Fic, Multi, Next Generation, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Series, Smartmouth Narrator, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2019-09-19 17:50:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 56,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17006325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ash818/pseuds/ash818
Summary: For a hundred and fifty years after Starling was founded, the name Queen meant: robber baron, war profiteer, captain of industry, tastemaker, careless elite. In the twenty-first century, it meant mass murder and domestic terrorism. Born to this legacy, Oliver Queen was the first to become something else.Jonathan Queen has been carrying his father's bow for the past five years, and he has gotten pretty damn good at it, if you ask him. The family business - both day and night shift - is doing well. He's even got his girlfriend in the office now, where he can pull her pigtails.But in the shadows, a strange new enemy grows stronger, threatening to destroy everything the Queens have ever built. A reckoning is coming, and not everyone will survive it.





	1. Chapter 1

Bruce Wayne has been dying for the past ten years, which is why we were all so surprised when he actually finished the job. He had been cranky and decrepit for so long, I guess we all believed he would go on like that indefinitely.

Three mornings ago, when I told my parents he had passed, Dad actually looked confused. “How?”

I frowned at him. “In a hail of bullets, beating the shit out of a terrorist.”

Dad glared at me over his coffee. Coming over from the kitchen island with a mimosa pitcher, Mom said, “You think you’re joking, but I wouldn’t put it past him.”

That was because she had not seen Wayne face to face since my sister’s college orientation last year. Had she visited in the last few months, she might have heard the old man wheeze for breath or seen him struggle to bring a spoon to his mouth. “McGinnis says he went very early this morning, in his sleep. They had him so full of morphine, he hadn’t been responsive for thirty-six hours prior.”

My parents exchanged glances, then they both sighed heavily. Mom leaned her head on her fist and said, “How’s Terry?”

It was hard to tell in an email. He sounded tired, maybe. Businesslike. Wayne didn’t really have anybody else, so at the end, managing the medications and home care all fell to McGinnis, and now the funeral was his to organize as well. After months of wiping drool from the chin of the man he respected most in the world, maybe part of him was even relieved. “I really couldn’t say.”

“It’s probably too early for anyone to know the details of the service,” Dad said quietly.

“You want to go?”

He frowned at me, as if it should have been a given.

But there were thirty years of mutual resentment between my father and Bruce Wayne. Even when Team Bat and Team Arrow were intimately dependent on each other to take down Ra’s al Ghul, Dad and Bruce had “professional disagreements.”

I once attempted to clarify: “Because you sometimes killed people, and the Bat didn’t?”

“That was certainly not a point in my favor,” was all he replied.

Mom was not much more helpful when I tried her instead. “You’ve met them, honey,” she said on a heavy sigh. “Dad gets an idea in his head, and it takes a near death experience to get it out. And then there’s Bruce, who is utterly convinced that his way is the best way, because if there were some better way, that’s how he’d be doing it.” She gave an irritable shake of her head. “Of course they didn’t get along.”

It wasn’t hard to picture. One dickish comment here, one shithead reply there. “And the twenty years of mutual silent treatment?”

Mom’s expression sobered. “After what we did to the League, and what happened to Dick…” She shook her head. “I guess they felt like there was no coming back from that.”

“You say ‘what happened to Dick’ as if I know.”

She avoided my eyes.  “He was killed in action,” she said, with finality.

McGinnis couldn’t pry it out of Wayne either. Whatever happened in ‘19, these guys never forgave each other for it. So I admit to some surprise that Dad wanted to fly across the country and arrange his face into a somber expression for a man he hadn’t even liked for thirty years.

In the event, it’s a family trip.

My parents are eager for the chance to see Abby, and it is never difficult to entice Tish with Gotham. She only balked at attending the service, on the grounds that, “I’ve never even spoken to Mr. Wayne.”

“Who cares?” I said. “You’re my date to the funeral.”

“Besides,” Mom chimed in, “I can write your airfare off as a business expense.”

Shameless nepotism is a beautiful thing. I spent most of 2045 trying to convince my mother to hire an assistant, and she spent the whole year telling me she didn’t need one. “Besides, we’re keeping way too many secrets to give somebody that much access to my life.”

But my mother is fifty-seven. The days when she could survive on four hours of sleep and half a gallon of coffee are long over, and they’ve taken their toll. In the fall I started occasionally finding her on the sofa in her office, curled up in pain and nausea with the lights out. The third time it happened, I had to carry her to the car.

A couple of weeks after Tish graduated from SCU, Mom leaned her head in my office door with an impish smile. “Come meet my new executive assistant.”

“You hired somebody?” Without even running them by me first?

I followed her to the corner office, where a woman was seated in front of her desk. Narrow shoulders, dark reddish hair braided and pinned up. She stood at the sound of footsteps, and I’d know that ass anywhere.

“Tish?”

She smiled and held out her hand. I shook it, heroically resisting the temptation to yank her into a hug. It was her first day, and she wore slacks and everything. She obviously wanted to look professional.

I turned to Mom. “Are you for real?”

“You told me to find someone I could trust,” Mom says. “She seemed like the perfect solution.”

In the two years since, I have never once dragged Tish into my office and bent her over the desk, nor have I so much as played footsie with her in meetings. We are grownup professionals doing serious work at our serious workplace. But having her here is a vast improvement over the previous situation, when I might go for days without seeing her except to sleep next to her.

“There aren’t enough hours,” as I once whined to Dad. “Even if I could keep track of them like I’m supposed to, there are literally not enough.”

If I’m not at Panoptic, I’m out somewhere in the dark jumping rooftops or beating someone up or planting surveillance tech. If I’m not hooded up, I’m training for it, because every skill I can burn into my brain and body is one more that might save my damn life some night. The end result is something like an eighty to one hundred hour work week. That doesn’t leave much time for trivialities like Netflix, doing my own laundry, cooking for myself, or maintaining human relationships.

“How did you do it?” I asked him.

“You mean date someone? It was simpler in my case,” he pointed out, not without sympathy. “Your mother was doing it with me.”

These days I have Tish in the office with me, where I can take her to lunch and pull her pigtails. And now here she is, climbing the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine with her hand in the crook of my arm.

“It looks like one of those drip sand castles,” Abby says on my other side, “but one that somebody made on their vacation from, you know, the Black Death. You think Catholic churches are creepy on purpose?”

Tish gives her a tolerant smile. “This one is Episcopalian.”

It is not a sand castle; it’s a few hundred nooks and perches where you can see without being seen. Maybe Dad is thinking the same thing, because a few steps ahead of us, he pauses in the throng of people to stand and tip his head back. Mom steps up next to him and slips her hand into his, and annoyed mourners stream around them.

Tish, Abby, and I come up behind them just in time to hear Mom say, “He’d fit right in, wouldn’t he?”

He’s imagining the old gargoyle crouched up there. I wonder if McGinnis pictured the same thing, walking up these steps.

Dad squeezes Mom’s hand and leads us through the vast, unwieldy brass doors with twisting human figures embossed on all twenty feet of them. We pass into the dim grandeur of the cathedral, and the private security professional in me takes one look around and suppresses a chuckle. Thank God this is someone else’s problem.

The acoustics are weird, there are fat marble pillars screwing with the lines of sight everywhere, and your bodyguards have to be on their best behavior. No flicking holy water at each other.

You would not expect that last problem from adults entrusted with the personal safety of others, but the last time Jones and Ramirez were working a wedding, he simply couldn’t resist. “I’d have punched him,” she said, “but Our Lady was looking right at me.”

The security here is well-behaved and unobtrusive. I count a half dozen posted beneath the stained glass windows, and doubtless there are more outside. One gaggle of three seems unattached to any principal in particular, but they could belong to anyone on a guest list that includes several sitting US senators, mayors of Gotham both current and former, and the CEOs of several of the highest-valued publicly traded corporations in the world.

A couple of faces are familiar. On the other side of the sanctuary, I catch sight of Laurel’s ex-husband Paul Kord, president of Kord Industries. He gives me a friendly, understated wave, and then he goes to find his seat, shadowed by a giant of a man wearing sunglasses indoors.

Up by the front, I spot McGinnis in a knot of people. His mother and brother flank him for moral support, and nearby stands Max Gibson, whose bright pink hair looks muted somehow. Police Commissioner Barbara Gordon, I know by reputation and by McGinnis’ occasional bitching about her.

When we say our hellos, the Commissioner listens indulgently to Abby going on about how much music Mr. Wayne introduced to her. He often gave her tickets to the Gotham Philharmonic. When Matt draws my sister into conversation, Gordon’s eyes follow her. “I see Bruce found someone to spoil.”

I do not like that word in connection with Abby. A few years back, the girl I was dating, who seemed bizarrely jealous of my sister, called her a “spoiled daddy’s girl” to my face. It was our very last fight.

But Gordon is smiling fondly. “I’m glad he got the chance, right there at the end.” Then someone catches her eye, and she nods hello to the middle-aged couple heading our way. They both wear well-tailored suits, and she glitters with jewelry that probably lives in an alarmed vault when not in use.

They brighten at the sight of my parents, and the woman comes over to distribute the kind of affectionate greetings I haven’t seen since I dated a Zeta.

“Stephanie!” Mom says, with a slightly trapped expression, the moment before the oncoming hug makes landfall. “Good to see you again.”

“And is this Jonathan?” Stephanie says, turning to me. “Oh, honey, I haven’t seen you since Paul’s wedding.” She pulls me down into a hug, and over my shoulder she says to Mom, “He was the most precious thing in his bow tie.”

Mom looks mollified by this. Or perhaps by the look on my face.

Stephanie is already moving on to Abby, whom she proclaims “the most photogenic child I ever saw - I swear, she could have been a Gerber baby.”

Now that I’ve been released, Dad pulls me over to introduce me to Tim Drake, head of Applied Sciences at Wayne Enterprises. Mom edges her way over as well, because it’s clear who the kindred spirits were back in the day.

Drake’s greeting is much quieter than his wife’s, but somehow he seems amused by - I don’t know, exactly. Perhaps by my existence. “Firm handshake like your father’s,” he observes. Then his mouth quirks, and he adds, “Same calluses too.”

I try my best not to react, but I can’t help glancing at my parents. Mom looks like she just swallowed some gum, but Dad is perfectly content and maybe even holding back laughter. He gives me a nod: _relax_.

Old friends, I guess. Christ, I hate not knowing everyone’s twisty backstory. Maybe Tim designed and fabricated equipment for Dad and Wayne back in the day. No telling how he ended up with Miss Congeniality.

Just before I turn away, I catch sight of a girl with Asian features and a surprising splash of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Despite her height, severe bun, and unflattering pantsuit, she still looks too young to be wearing an earpiece and a sidearm discreetly concealed under her blazer. She catches me looking, and she gives me a long, slow blink, the way cats do when they trust you.

I nod acknowledgment to a fellow private security professional. Then my attention is forfeit to Stephanie Drake, who pats my arm and gestures at Tish. “Jonny, is this your girlfriend? Oh my God, well done.”

A few minutes later, as we walk away Mom hisses, “She’s like a senior superlatives yearbook page. ‘Most adorable! Most photogenic! Absolute bestest ever!’”

“Felicity,” Dad says. “You know she means every word.”

Mom closes her eyes, and the tendons stand out in her neck. “That’s the worst part.”

“She’s always reminded me of your mother,” Dad hazards.

Mom silences him with a look, and we find our seats.

Bruce’s final send-off involves all the pomp and circumstance of a state funeral. Barbara Gordon’s eulogy hits all the right notes about how Wayne turned his personal tragedies into generosity and dedication to the people of Gotham. If you didn’t know the Big Black Pointy-Eared Secret, it would sound like innocuous smoke blown up the ass of a wealthy philanthropist.

Abby sits next to me, and very genuine tears are sliding down her face. Since she moved here for school two years ago, she and Wayne have had occasional tea parties. God knows what they found to talk about, but the way she tells it, “he was actually really sweet.”

McGinnis assures me that the sweetheart who poured my sister Earl Grey was in fact the same judgy stone-faced curmudgeon who worked mission control for us. Wayne vaguely disapproved of me before I ever picked up a bow, and his opinion only marginally improved afterwards. The first night I ran a mission in Gotham, while the Bat and I waited to ambush a convoy of arms dealers, Wayne said in my earpiece, “Arrow, I’m surprised your predecessor never taught you to sit still.”

“I am sitting still. I have been for twenty-eight minutes.”

That gravelly voice said, “You’re bouncing your knee up and down.”

“No, I’m--” I looked down at my knee. I stopped bouncing. “No, I’m not.”

He could always find fault with me, and most of the time he could blame it on Dad.

The priest summons the pallbearers, and Terry gets to his feet and falls into companionable step with Tim Drake heading up the aisle. Mrs. Drake and Commissioner Gordon follow, and with the help of two silver-haired men whom I don’t recognize, they lift the casket onto their shoulders the old-fashioned way.

They pass in silence, and in silence we follow them.

We all stream out into the sunshine in a mass of dark clothing and a building hum of conversation, and my family keeps left and finds a patch of lawn to linger on. At the curb, McGinnis does more than his share of the heavy lifting to load the casket into the sleek hearse. The doors close, and he stands staring at them, looking a bit lost.

Then he puts his hands in his pockets, squints against the glaring sun, and trudges across the grass to us. He takes up a post next to me, and I bump his shoulder with mine.

For a little while, we watch the mill of the crowd, until finally he says, “Gordon didn’t mention his sunny disposition.”

I nod. “Probably got nervous and forgot.”

Tish leans around my arm to look at McGinnis, and then she glances up at me. It’s plain on her face that she firmly believes a medicinal hug is indicated, and her only question is, Do you want to administer it, or should I?

He’ll accept one from her. With the faintest pressure between her shoulder blades, I send her his way.

That’s when shit starts blowing up.

The pyrotechnic boom bypasses my brain and goes straight to my gut. Without conscious thought, I’m down on the grass with Tish squashed under me, arms covering her head. McGinnis hunkers down next to us.

Screams peal across the lawn, and then comes the rush and crackle of fire. A single car alarm starts to wail. I look up, and halfway down the block a plume of flame is leaping up high enough to to be visible over the parked cars. Whatever is burning is sure doing it loud and flashy and huge.

From various spots nearby, where they’ve been hugging dirt like the rest of us, men in suits and earpieces get to their feet, and they start cautiously approaching the fire.

Tish uncurls beneath me, and to our left, Mom and Dad have both smooshed Abby in an awkward-looking pile-on. Dad and McGinnis push up into nearly identical crouches and scan the area clinically. All around us, people in their designer funeral wear lay frozen or shaking.

Fifty feet from us, the four security guys break into a half-jog toward the flames, hands hovering near their sidearms.

It was not a bomb that just went off. It didn’t throw enough shrapnel, and it only kicked off one car alarm. No, this thing was designed for maximum noise and pretty colors.

Which means it’s a distraction.

Deep breath. Something else is coming. “Keep down,” I say quietly, laying a hand on Tish’s back.

McGinnis nods agreement. “This isn’t over.”

Tish keeps down, and she crawls over to grab Abby’s hand.

“Some kind of big, high-powered flashbang?” Mom asks Dad.

“An M80, probably.” His eyes sweep the street, and he glances at me. “The man wearing work boots with his suit. White, 5’9”, short brown hair.”

“Yeah, I’m looking. Or the three guys with earpieces and no apparent billionaire.”

Security is staring intently at exactly what they’ve been given to stare at, which is embarrassing for them, professionally speaking. We’re scanning the crowd. But there are too many people, most of them still half-crouched or hidden. They’re all wearing approximately the same color, and some of them are distractingly hysterical.

“There,” Dad says.

Not far from the cathedral steps, the back door of an SUV has just swung open. Two men in dust gray khakis and long black sleeves are calmly, forcibly escorting Paul Kord toward an SUV. Behind them, the giant in sunglasses lies spreadeagled on the grass.

They have Paul Kord. He looks almost comically affronted.

What happens next happens fast.

Dad yells, “Paul!” and for a second, he looks over at us.

But then all three men tumble into the SUV, the door slams, and the vehicle pulls smoothly away from the curb. They don’t peel out, and there are no squealing tires. It looks almost normal, how easily they glide away down the street.

Fuck no, they’re not stealing my sort-of aunt’s ex-husband from my best friend’s sort-of father figure’s funeral. That is not fucking allowed.

I look to McGinnis, but the second he meets my eyes, I realize that he can’t be much help here. In this company, he is strictly a civilian, and damn is he pissed about it. Dad is wearing an identical expression, because he is under the same constraints.

But I’m not. I’m a private security professional known to law enforcement as “that idiot who chased Ilinca Nicolescu up an exterior wall and got himself kicked off a third floor balcony.” I can pursue whoever I want, and they’ll assume I’m stupid, not a secret vigilante.

I’m going to have to do it in a borrowed car, once I yank one of these Uber drivers out from behind the wheel. And I’m going to have to do it unarmed, unless you count the knife, length of cord, and square of duct tape that live in my pocket at all times. I feel naked in this suit, and these shoes aren’t broken in, and all in all I’m pretty pissed off at the bad guys’ timing.

But there doesn’t seem to be anybody else.

All this runs through my head in about three seconds. Decision made. All right. Let’s go.

I pop into a crouch, eyes fixed on the license plate - LVX 497 - and I ignore Mom yanking at my sleeve.

I make it three steps. Then a black sedan pulls hard left out of the funeral procession, right into the oncoming SUV. The screech and crunch are loud even from here. Both vehicles skid sideways into each other and come to rest in a V, nose to nose.

That buys us a little time. So first priority: weapon.

I run for Kord’s downed bodyguard, who is either dead or concussed. I lay two fingers on his neck, flip aside his jacket - I think that’s a pulse, and that is definitely a SIG Sauer.

The Arrow can’t be seen with a gun in his hand, but the managing director of Panoptic Security can. It’s not my weapon of choice, but Dig made sure I knew how to use it. None of our bodyguards would do a damn thing I said if I hadn’t murdered several hundred paper targets alongside them.

I snatch up the SIG, and hunched in the half-decent cover of a parked car, I check the safety and the chamber. Good to go.

I peek over the hood of the car.

I’m not the only one crashing this kidnapping. Finally, one of the security personnel has got eyes on the right spot. It’s Freckles, the Drakes’ bodyguard. She just crouched down two cars away from me. Her eyes sweep the street, and they land on me. She gives me a little nod of recognition.

And there she goes, moving low and careful between the bumpers. Not getting too close to the SUV jerking around fruitlessly, just getting into place while they’re too busy to notice her.

Does she expect me to follow? She may feel like she knows me by reputation, but I’m a stranger to her. No guarantee we can work together on the fly.

The SUV driver is working the wheel, trying to back out of here. Gotham’s streets were constructed in the horse and buggy era, and they’re too narrow and congested for a three-point turn. The road is half-blocked by the crunched Jaguar, and the shoulders are chock full of cars.

Freckles catches my eye again, and she jerks her head toward the driver’s side of the SUV, fully expecting me to handle it.

The kidnappers have finally realized there will be no backing out of this one, and a man with ink sleeves jumps out of the rear passenger side. He yanks open the driver’s door on the Jag and reaches in to fumble awkwardly with the unconscious driver’s seat belt. Drags him onto the pavement, and all of a sudden I recognize Tim Drake.

Ah. Freckles let her principal drive right into traffic. Of course she can’t let this go without a fight.

Tattoo Addict gestures to his buddies in the SUV. They’re switching getaway cars.

Freckles and I lock eyes. These guys are vulnerable while they make the transfer. Once they slam the doors of Drake’s Jag behind them, we won’t get another opportunity like this. I tuck the SIG into my slacks at my lower back, which is not my favorite way to carry, but it’ll have to do. Here’s hoping I won’t have to use it after all. Guns provide some amazing mechanical advantage in a fight, but I don’t much want to open fire on a crowded street.

Freckles moves fast and easy around the far side of the Jag. Only the driver gets out on the near side of the SUV; the other three are hustling out the passenger side.

The driver is mine. I leap out from hiding between the parked cars and catch him just as he rounds the rear bumper. The double-headed eagle tattooed on his neck is a helpful “Grab Here” sticker. With both hands, I smash his head into the window.

It’s not the kind of thing you can do quietly. His strangled scream and the satisfying thunk alert the other two flanking Kord. They look over sharply, all jangling nerves and drawn weapons.

The one with the iron grip on Kord’s arm looks remarkably like David Beckham.

Tattoo Addict leaps into the driver’s seat of the Jag, yelling for the other two to get in the fucking vehicle.

Kord glances from one of his captors to the other, and then he does the smartest thing I’ve ever seen an untrained civilian do in a situation like this. He crumples to the ground.

Instantly, they are both yelling and pointing weapons at him, trying to force him to his feet. But they can’t afford to shoot their own prize. They’ve got no leverage here. And while they’re fucking around with empty threats, Freckles is sneaking around the Jaguar’s bumper.

In the fifth grade, our class pet was a ball python named Julius Squeezer. He ate like an emperor - live mice only. At feeding time, we would watch wide-eyed as he curved sinuously around a corner with his sights on something terrified and squeaky.

Freckles looks like she gave him lessons.

Then she breaks focus for half a second - just long enough to look me full in the face. We both know this is our shot. Got to move in sync.

I just hope to God she doesn’t mean to take a literal shot. I don’t want to catch a stray bullet.

At the exact same moment, we exchange nods. And then we leap.

Beckham looks up just in time to sweep his muzzle my way. Not in time to stop me slamming into him. He knows enough to stagger back and absorb the impact instead of letting me take him to the ground, but he can’t keep hold of his weapon, and it skitters away under the body of a parked car.

“Paul, move!” I bellow, but he doesn’t need telling. He is already crawling away.

In the driver’s seat of the Jag, Tattoo Addict realizes the mission has gone to shit, and he suddenly remembers a pressing appointment elsewhere. With a screech of metal on metal, he peels out of here.

Beckham is a pro, so of course I haven’t disarmed him. A knife has materialized in his hand, and he’s doing his damnedest to slide it up under my ribs.

I left my kevlar in my other suit jacket. I backpedal fast.

In the space I’ve created, I’m aware of Freckles in my periphery, using Beckham’s momentum against him to swing up and wrap herself around his neck and shoulders. They both stagger backwards into the side of the Jag with a thud.

She’s got this.

I slide right, leaving my back wide open for her to cover, and I square up to Beckham and force him into the corner formed by the crumpled noses of the two cars.

I’ve got a knife too, asshole.

Fights like this happen fast. There is no choreographed dance, no give-and-take, and not a lot of technique going on. He lunges, I slash, he nicks me. We close.

Two messy seconds later, he’s bleeding all over my bespoke suit, and the knife falls from his hand. I lock an arm across his neck, kick his weapon away, and slowly lower him to the ground. He curses and struggles all the way down, clawing at my arm and going purple in the face.

Footsteps come running up behind us as he loses consciousness. Hold, and keep holding - I need him out long enough to restrain him. A few more seconds of reduced blood flow to his brain aren’t going to kill him.

“Here,” Dad says, kneeling next to us and tugging his tie from his neck. He yanks Beckham’s wrists into place and starts binding him with practiced efficiency.

Nearby, McGinnis is politely offering duct tape to Freckles, who is perched on her kidnapper’s back. Her mouth doesn’t so much as twitch, but she seems to smile up at McGinnis with just her eyes. She makes a “be my guest” gesture, and her eyes twinkle when he goes to work.

Panting, I sit back on the asphalt, absently loosening my tie and taking stock. At the SUV’s rear bumper, Commissioner Gordon and one of her officers are attending to the man I concussed. On the church lawn, Paul Kord is lying in the grass looking dizzy and barking at the gathering crowd to back off.

All around us, people are slowly daring to surface, craning their necks to survey the scene. Some shocked, shaky people are clutching at each other or crying with the adrenaline comedown, and others are loudly demanding answers of law enforcement officers who don’t have them.

“Nice work,” Dad murmurs to me as I pass him my tie for our new friend’s ankles. “Is any of the blood yours?”

I tug at the gash in the shoulder of my suit, where the bloom of red on my chest originates. The blade went through one layer of wool and one of cotton to bite into my skin. “I can’t see it; my neck’s not that bendy,” I tell Dad, leaning toward him for inspection. “Feels like surface damage, though.”

He pauses in his knots to frown at the wound, and then he frowns at me. “Closer to your jugular than I’d like.”

“Hey. Any one you walk away from.”

His scowl intensifies. He hates that expression.

Then he turns his attention to Beckham, who has begun to stir in his bonds. I make a noise that means, May I please be excused from the scene of the assault?

Dad grunts assent, and he puts his knee in Beckham’s back.

I lurch to my feet, and I head over to Freckles, still perched on her catch. She is watching with detached interest as McGinnis and a uniformed officer help Tim Drake to his feet and walk him over to a bus stop bench. She makes no move to go to him, so I guess I won’t be interrupting if I offer my hand.

“Hey, nice working with you. I’m Jonathan Queen.”

She accepts the handshake with a very formal incline of her head, and she gives me the same faint smile she gave McGinnis.

I guess I have to prompt her. “I didn’t catch your name before.”

She lays a hand on her chest, and the smile finally touches her mouth. “Cassie.”

That’s about when law enforcement starts swarming us in earnest, with proper handcuffs and buzzing radios and other official paraphernalia. “Why don’t we take him off your hands?” they’re asking both Cassie and Dad.

“All right, buddy. Let’s get you taken care of,” a grandfatherly man in a GCPD vest says, laying a hand on my arm. He starts leading me away, probably toward a nice EMT.

“I’ll catch up with you in a minute,” I toss over my shoulder to Cassie.

She gives me a cheery little wave, and then I lose sight of her.

It takes five minutes for Abby to stop shaking, ten for the EMTs to clean and stitch the gash in my shoulder, and an hour for GCPD to grill me about my every microdecision from the time of the explosion to the moment they took over the scene. They confirm with a dozen witnesses that my description is accurate.

Such close scrutiny feels like being called a liar, but I realize Gordon is doing me a favor. No one will be able to claim later that my use of force was unlawful.

When the cops are done with me, I sit on the lawn with my family, and we do what people usually do right after an interruption to their regularly scheduled programming: we tell each other the story of what we just saw. First to confirm that it did in fact happen, then to round out the details from various angles.

“How did Mr Drake get clear?” Abby asks McGinnis. “One second I saw him, the next I didn't.”

“Stephanie went running in there and dragged him out.” At the looks on our faces, he says, “What? She's tough. Does a lot of hot yoga.”

I never do catch up with Cassie.

There is still a body to bury. Only a small contingent is invited to the little cemetery on the grounds of Wayne Manor, with its low wrought iron fence and its imposing marble headstones. McGinnis takes pride of place closest to the rig that will lower the casket into the waiting earth. Without much fanfare, we mutter along to the quick graveside service. Most of the attendees only linger on the lawn for a little while.

Only the people here for McGinnis - his family and mine - walk up to the mansion afterward. The high ceilings and echoing finery seem even more impressive with all the black crepe, and we keep our voices down as we file into the foyer.

“Ace,” Abby says, opening her arms to the Great Dane trotting down the hall. “Come here, buddy.” She has probably been wanting to hug on Percy for the past hour and a half, but I guess this big slobberer will do.

By unspoken arrangement, my parents lead the civilians into the largest of the manor’s multiple parlors, and Mom launches into the story of the first time she met Bruce Wayne. Matt and Mrs. McGinnis don’t even notice when the active vigilantes slip away.

We head for the grandfather clock in the west hall. McGinnis gently opens its face and adjusts the hands, and a section of walnut paneling swings open onto pitch blackness.

I busted out laughing the first time I watched him do that, until the look on Wayne’s face shut me up. I don’t feel like laughing today.

I follow McGinnis and Max down the rough steps cut into the stone, and motion detectors flip the lights on for us. The Batcave looks exactly as it did last time I was here: remarkably similar to the lair. A bank of computers much like Mom’s stands against one rough wall, weapons and training equipment line another, and at the far end mannequins stand at attention in the uniforms of yesteryear, frozen behind glass.

You need the same things, no matter where you do the job. Tech, gear, floorspace. Memory.

Unlike at home, a thin layer of dust coats the desktops.

Max and I take up our accustomed positions at the console and leaning against the work table. McGinnis looks us over, then nods decisively. "Whoever did this, they did it at his funeral."

"I know," Max says softly.

"We're going to find them," McGinnis says dispassionately, "and we're going to fuck them up. So let's talk about how.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Bruce's funeral, the Queens return to Starling, and Panoptic takes on a new client.

“Who has reason to want Kord?” McGinnis asks me and Max, for all the world as if we have a clue.

Max and I glance at each other. He wants to do this now, with an ongoing funeral reception a few floors above.

I sigh. “Lots of people.”

“Kord Industries holds a lot of Defense Department contracts,” Max says, shifting her weight uncomfortably. “And their biotech division is leading the market.”

“Also, he’s worth twenty billion dollars.”

“The girl shadowing the Drakes,” McGinnis says, undeterred. “No way was she standard private security. And she disappeared on us.”

Max turns to her desktop and reaches for a fluffy screen duster with a sigh. “I can think of a few organizations that might’ve seen this coming and planted one of their agents.”

Quietly enough that it’s obviously not meant for me, McGinnis asks her, “Waller?”

Amanda Waller has never so much as inconvenienced me personally. The closest I’ve ever come to interacting with her was when she took Ilinca Nicolescu into custody, and Mom and I watched the transfer from a hijacked security camera.

But not one of the Team Arrow Motorycle Club, Starling Original, can talk about her without a note of contempt. “She sees the bigger picture,” is the nicest thing Mom has ever been able to say about her. Lyla worked with her closely for years, and she has warned me never to give ARGUS a reason to pay me too much attention.

Max looks back at McGinnis patiently for a moment, and then she starts dragging up news alerts.

“Who just crashed Batman’s funeral?” is not the first hit on Google. She keeps snagging text boxes into the air and tossing them aside.

McGinnis’ knuckles whiten around the edge of the desk.“Why didn’t we see this one coming?”

“Because we weren’t looking for it, Terry.”

They’ve been looking out for an old man whose gnarled arthritic hands couldn’t button his own pajamas. “Come on,” I tell them both. “This isn’t the time.”

McGinnis shakes his head. “We can at least narrow it down.”

“No.” I try to say it gently. I’m not good at it. “We can’t. GCPD hasn’t even processed those guys yet. Today, mini quiches. Tomorrow, detection.”

“Tomorrow, what?” says Max absently, sucking all the whimsy out of a decent line yet again. She doesn’t do it because she dislikes me. She only takes a slightly condescending tone because of that. The joke-ruining is just Max.

“Detection,” McGinnis says, and to my relief he pushes off from the desk and heads for the door. “We’re detectives. We detect shit.”

“Ah,” Max says, as if the joke weren’t worth its explanation. Which it’s not, because they never are, God damn it, Max.

A winding route through the stone corridors takes us up to ground level and opens into the kitchen. Our entrance is fairly inconspicuous, and we don’t seem to have been missed. 

In the south-by-southwest parlor-by-living room, Abby is cuddled up on the sofa with Ace, and Matt McGinnis has pulled up a chair to share a plate of tiny sandwiches with her. Tish is nursing a drink at the other end of the sofa, watching them with a thoughtful expression.

When we come through the door carrying platters and pitchers, Mrs. McGinnis looks up from a conversation with my father. Her eyes land on Terry, and she scoots a few inches on the loveseat to make room for him.

Instead he sets a veggie platter on the table, and he heads for the window to brood. His mother looks at the floor.

Tish quietly gets to her feet, and she comes to meet me at the wet bar. “Mix me a mint julep?”

“Sure.”

Very quietly, she adds, “Also, who was Dick Grayson? People talk about him like I’m supposed to already know.”

She knows so much already, it can’t hurt to tell her this: “You familiar with Nightwing?”

Tish is a Gotham native. Her eyes widen. “Nightwing used to hit on your mom?”

It’s news to me, but it doesn’t surprise me. “She was like catnip for vigilantes. Don’t ask me why.”

“Is it really so mysterious?”

I nod. Hard. “It’s going to stay that way.”

Over on the sofa, the catnip’s phone rings. She glances at the name before she answers, and she holds the phone out to Dad. “Can you take it?”

He doesn’t. He just silently laughs at her.

She huffs, picks up, and heads for the privacy of the next room. “Hey, Stephanie, thanks for checking in.”

When she comes back, it’s with an update. Tim is leaving the hospital with a few bruises, a mild concussion, and instructions to rest. “I’m also supposed to tell you,” she mutters to me, “that you’re welcome for dinner next time you’re in Gotham.”

The afternoon passes slowly. It’s hard to make conversation when half the room can’t talk openly to the other half about the whole reason we’re here.  Max, who is usually good at smoothing over these kinds of things, keeps sneaking glances at her phone the whole time. In a quiet moment, she comes to ask for a mint julep of her own, and I’m sure she’s found something about our newest case.

Instead she asks me, “How has your mom been?”

Over the past eighteen months, Max has spent a lot of time on Watchtower to cover for Mom’s migraines and stressed-out exhaustion. Partly this is to save my skin, but mostly it’s out of deference to Mom. She will tell you in casual conversation, “I have immense respect for Felicity Queen’s work, and I like her personally.” What this actually means is, “Every time she speaks to me, I light up like the Bellagio fountain. Grace me with your awesome, Queen Fee.”

I don’t know where the infosec nerds came up with that nickname. Dad once muttered that it had something to do with Beyonce.

“She’s got a lot going on, scaling up our cybersecurity division and wrangling all the new hires. She’s wanted to for a long time, and we’ve finally got the resources for it. Thanks for the Natale kid’s name, by the way.”

Max smiles big. “How’s Sam working out for you guys?”

“Mom’s got him leading the team on both of our government contracts.” I can’t specify which agencies, but Max looks suitably impressed. “I don’t know shit about quantum key distribution, but according to everybody who does, he’s a fucking rock star.”

She flutters her fingers at me. “Has he taught you any sign?”

“Let’s see, I can say thank you.” I demonstrate as formally as I know how. “And sorry.” I make a circle on my chest with a closed fist. “And alcohol.” I show her that one too.

“You’re a prodigy.”

“I’ll have to be, because Sam says I’m a bitch to lipread.”

Not long after, I wander over to McGinnis, who is brooding at the window again. We exchange a few low-effort observations about the ceremony, the attendees, the eulogy. Then he turns back to the view across the lawn, and I try to figure out whether he wants company or to be left alone. I remember how wildly you can swing from one mood to the other.

“We did it like he wanted,” he says at last. “No organ music. He was very specific about that. ‘Don’t wake me up with any overwrought music.’”

“I’m guessing he had all kinds of instructions for what to do with his suit and his toys, too.”

McGinnis sets his drink down on the broad windowsill. “Actually, no. He wasn’t really…” He clears his throat. “Toward the end, he was kind of losing track of things. What he was doing, why he was doing it. If he was anywhere but home he’d get confused really easily. He started forgetting the day. Then the year.”

McGinnis has told me all this in exhausted phone calls over the past few months. Nevertheless I nod and keep an eye on his faint frown, and I let him talk.

“He got my name wrong a lot.”

Shit. That’s new. “I’m sorry.”

“Not his fault. He thought he was talking to Jason or Dick. Mostly Dick.”

Wayne adopted a few strays before he ever met McGinnis, and as far as I know Grayson was the only one he ever lost. I’ve got no shortage of annoyingly accomplished relatives to live up to, and I feel the weight of my family’s legacy every day. But here is McGinnis competing with a ghost who was apparently as charming and good-looking as he was combat effective. The amazing Dick Grayson, who has only gotten more perfect in everyone’s memory over the decades.

McGinnis blows air through his teeth. “I think Grayson was weighing on him pretty heavy, the last few months.”

In the leaning shadows on the lawn, a lone figure crests the hill by the oak grove and its small fenced cemetery. It’s a broad-shouldered man of about fifty, judging by his graying hair and stocky build.

“Who’s that?” I ask McGinnis.

He frowns at the figure and doesn’t answer me. The man swings casually through the gate and comes to stand at the headstone.

“Is he supposed to be here?” If not, I’ll go take care of it.

McGinnis narrows his eyes and stares for a few seconds, and then he nods very slowly. “Yeah, I guess he is.”

The figure leans toward the headstone, hands in his pockets, and gives it a little kick.

I raise an eyebrow at McGinnis, who has made no outraged move to stop this. “Is he allowed to do that?”

“Yeah.” McGinnis actually smiles faintly. “I guess he is.”

“Who is he?”

“Not as much of an asshole as he pretends to be.” And he turns away from the window.

I respect the shit out of the Batman. All three generations of him. But I will never understand him.

  
  
  


On our first day back at Panoptic, Mom, Tish, and I get so many questions about the incident at Wayne’s funeral that it seems easier to just pull everyone into the bullpen and hash out the story as an object lesson. What were the security failures at the venue, what were the strengths? How can we learn from this?

“Lesson number one,” Jones says smugly, pounding me on the back as he passes by. “Don’t pull that shit in front of a Panoptic operative.”

“Did you get stabbed again?” Ramirez says, crossing her arms at me. “I heard you got stabbed again.”

“Not much, thank you.”

The infosec nerds wander away first, because this isn’t their area of interest, but Ramirez wants diagrams, and Jones wants a blow-by-blow. We spend a good chunk of the morning on it. Honestly it’s a damn good time.

Which is possibly why Sam Natale waits until after lunch to drop some bad news on us.

He leans his head in the door of Mom’s office, glassbook in his hands, and says, “Can I show you something?”

It took me a while to get used to his Deaf accent. Now I understand him about 85% of the time, which seems fair, as that’s about how often he understands me. Out of everyone in the office, Tish gives him the least trouble. For a couple weeks, I thought he had a crush on her, but then it turned out that he gravitates toward her because she enunciates so beautifully.

Mom gestures him into her office. “Is this about the Kord case?”

I drag my chair around the desk to sit next to her, because it has become habit. We face him when he is talking to us, and we try not to talk over each other. He can only lipread one person at a time.

He drags the holo off the surface of his glassbook to show us a photo of a late model Avalon. “The one that got away,” he says, looking at me. “The Jaguar was last seen heading north, so I went looked for CCTV footage from that general area. Found this, parked about a quarter mile from an Interstate 55 onramp. The plates don’t match the model, so - probably stolen.”

Mom grins at him. “You found the switch car?”

“EZ-Pass toll log puts the car on the turnpike twelve minutes after the attempted kidnapping. It exits at an airfield just outside the city. The flight log shows one flight to Ankara - ” - and then he says something that sounds like “a ghostie,” which can’t be right. 

“What was that?”

“A Gulfstream. You know, the plane? It was on lease to a shell company that I traced to a dead end in Singapore.”

“So last known location is Ankara?”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Queen,” Tish says, leaning her head in the door. “ The guy from Ernst and Young is on the phone.”

Mom waves her away. “Tell him I’m in a meeting.”

“It’s about the irregularities in the 2044 payroll deductions.”

“Tell him I’m dead.” Mom turns back to Sam. “You said last known location is Ankara?”

He shakes his head. “ No flight with that tail number landed in Ankara, but Relief International logged the tail numbers in Bahrain .”

I mutter, “Oh, that motherfucker is long gone.”

Mom gives me a warning look, and Sam wrinkles his forehead at me, the way he always does when I’m too mumbly for his hearing aids.

I raise my voice and try to enunciate. “I said that motherfucker is long gone.”

Mom closes her eyes in annoyance. “Jonathan.”

“He didn’t hear me the first time.”

Sam beams at me. “That’s as far as I could track him.”

“You did great work, man. Now we know we’re dealing with pros - probably mercenaries, maybe foreign operatives.”

“Bad news for Paul,” Mom says, sinking back in her chair. “You don’t go to the trouble of hauling someone all the way to Bahrain if you’re planning to give them back.”

“All the flight switches? They could’ve disappeared him anywhere along the way. That lowers the odds on ransom as a motive.”

“But if they just wanted him dead, we wouldn’t have had that dog and pony show,” Mom frets. “It must be something he knows. And, given how many government contracts Kord Industries maintains, that’s a long list.”

I’ve always liked Paul Kord, ever since he convinced Laurel to give me an airsoft gun for my eleventh birthday.  When Captain Lance died, Paul showed up for Laurel to lean on. When Panoptic was intercepting death threats to her office last fall, the check for our services had his name on it. They  are the most impressively amicable exes I’ve ever seen, and she still occasionally brings him to our parties. He let Abby talk his ear off about Gotham at the last one.

Anyone trying to fuck with him is going to answer to us.

“That’s all I’ve managed to dig up,” Sam says.

Eventually.  _ Eventually _ they will answer to us, once we know something actionable.

My next call is to Max Gibson.

GCPD has had time to process the three men we captured, and two of them are  in pretrial hold at Blackgate Prison. Apparently they are extremely shy. They have opened their mouths only to ask for lawyers.

“The getaway driver you took down is at Charity Hospital with a fractured skull,” Max says, and as usual I can’t tell whether she’s judging me. “He’ll pull through, but there might be long-term damage.”

I think of Selby, who still struggles with mild aphasia, and I clear my throat. Selby sustained his traumatic brain injury while defending noncombatants, not while committing multiple violent crimes at a crowded funeral service. “I’ll send flowers.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Max says.

This time three years ago, she was not very impressed with the neat bow I tied on a case where Laurel couldn’t get a conviction. None of the perpetrators died by my hand. Only one of the three was ever even in the same room with me.

I may have given their boss the impression that they’d turned on him. Soon after the next high tide receded, they were found chained to the pilings of a pier. They’d torn themselves to ribbons on the barnacles, trying to keep their heads above water.

Max was working mission control for me and McGinnis when it happened, and she knew why I’d done it.

“Doesn’t make it right,” she said. “Is this how you’re going to operate? Blinding people, maiming people, and now the next best thing to murder?”

I don’t permanently disable my targets deliberately. I don’t cut bits off, I avoid crush injuries, and I’m meticulous with my restraint technique. Too loose and they wriggle free, too tight and they lose a hand to necrosis. Team Arrow prides itself on delivering high quality scumbags to Chief Hall, which permits the occasional puncture wound but never any dead appendages rotting off them.

But there is no perfect boundary between the force required to incapacitate and the force sufficient to maim or kill. Sometimes the nearest weapon to hand is a bottle of cleaning solvent, so I throw it in a gang member’s face. Sometimes I break bones and tear into flesh. Mostly, I feel completely and fervently fucking righteous when I do it.

If I didn’t, much worse things would happen to much better people.

McGinnis must not have these problems.  Apparently he’s such a surgeon at hand to hand, he can put people out of commission  _ politely _ .

“ All three men were traveling sterile,” Max goes on. “No ID and no papers. Going off the mugshots I yanked, their tattoos suggest they’re Kasnian or maybe Markovian.”

“So mercenaries, then.”

“Almost definitely. As for the one that got away,” she says, pleased with herself, “let me tell you a twisty tale about him.”

“The flight to Bahrain?”

She sounds crestfallen. “Oh. So you know.”

“Sam’s every bit as good as you billed him.”

There is a rueful note of pride in her voice now. “Go Tigers.”

Before she hangs up - “Hey, how’s McGinnis?”

She hesitates. “I’ll tell him you’re asking after him.”

It would be stupid to ask whether he’s back on the night shift. “How has work been?”

There is another long pause. “We’ll find a stride.”

There are a half dozen things I want to say to her, and I don’t have the words for any of them. I settle for: “Keep an eye on him.”

“Always do.”

  
  


Among the perks of sharing an office with Tish is that, these days, when I go down to the lair in the evenings, she comes with me.

Sometimes she works on her laptop while I take a sledgehammer to a tire, and sometimes she changes into those gorgeous yoga pants and does planks alongside me. When we’re working a case, she often sifts intel while I train and reads the relevant passages aloud to me. It works well; I’m a slow reader, and I retain information best when I’m moving. Just occasionally, she steps onto the mats with me and asks to review techniques for slipping a clinch hold.

In the elevator, she curls her hand around the crook of my elbow. “Can we go home fairly early tonight? I feel like I haven’t had you to myself in weeks.”

“I don’t remember anyone else in bed with us this morning.”

“I mean it’s been one thing after another,” she says, giving me an ineffectual hip check. “For instance, you were stabbed.”

God damn it, everybody’s acting like I lost that fight. “You should have seen what I did to the other guy.”

“I did,” she says with a smile. “And how is he enjoying Blackgate Prison?”

I fill her in on Max’s call, including the part where I may have doled out some permanent brain damage.

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,” she says, not sounding very sorry at all.

A few months back, after Tish made me macarons for breaking a crooked CEO’s arm, Max frowned at me and asked, “Isn’t she kind of into God? What about all that turning the other cheek stuff?”

“I haven’t had any deep theological discussions with her about it. Maybe she thinks Jesus doesn’t like securities fraud either.”

Terry blew air through his teeth. “In another set of circumstances, that girl would have made a terrifying mob wife.”

My little mob wife steps out of the elevator ahead of me and heads for her workstation. “Mrs. Drake called your mom this afternoon, but she seemed happy to talk to me instead. Mr. Drake’s concussion wasn’t serious, and he’ll be back at work tomorrow. They’re a little annoyed that a complete stranger was guarding them all day and then disappeared.”

“About that. You saw the girl fight. Who did she remind you of?”

She shakes her head. “I’m not a martial artist.”

“But what did it look like?”

“Honestly?” She looks me in the face. “Shaula.”

Yeah, time to have a talk with Sara.

You never know which time zone you’ll find her in, but I seem to have caught her on my side of the International Date Line. On vidchat she tips her coffee mug to me and says, “You made the news, kiddo. There were cell phone videos.”

“Yeah, we put the fun in funeral. McGinnis was thrilled, let me tell you.”

Sara’s expression softens. “How’s he taking it?”

He’s probably a three-act shit show, if I had to guess. “This was always going to be a rough time, you know?”

She gives me one of her smiles that aren’t smiles - the kind I usually see on Dad or Tish. “That’s a heavy mantle to be carrying alone. Watch out for him over the next few months, yeah?”

I don’t need to be told that. I clear my throat, and I just launch into it: “So, ah. Cassie. She moves like you, she fights like you. She took a special interest in your ex-brother-in-law.”

Sara’s smile turns to something more genuine.

“I thought you might be able to tell me more about her.”

There’s that dimple in her chin, the one that makes her look about ten years younger. “She liked working with you.”

The mysterious girl talked about me? “What did she say?”

Sara gives a fond little shrug. “She just seemed to have enjoyed the job.”

Huh. “So she is one of yours.”

Sara’s expression turns carefully neutral. “I wouldn’t call her that. But I’ve been working with her for a few years now.”

“She looks like she’s about twelve. How long has she been in this business?”

“She’s twenty,” Sara says patiently. “And she knows what she’s doing.”

“I know. I saw.” I was questioning your ethics, not her competence. “I don’t expect you to actually answer this, but - is she ARGUS?”

Sara leans on her elbows and gives me her warmest smile. “How are your folks?”

From there, it’s just shooting the breeze. Mom and Dad are still Starling’s most freakishly accomplished power couple. Sara is still unable to tell us the specifics of almost anything about her life. I am still her favorite nephew.

Tish leans into the frame to say hi, and finally Sara asks me to give her love to an unwieldy list of people.

I counteroffer: “Or you could come see us. It’s been what, two years?”

“Throw a big enough party, and I will.” She grins, and as always she signs off with Captain Lance’s line: “Take care of yourself, kiddo.”

“Twenty years old,” Tish echoes when Sara has hung up. “Cassie belongs in a college classroom, not… whatever she and Sara are involved in.”

That gives me pause. I leapt into combat with a girl the same age as my baby sister. “We don’t know her at all. No telling where she belongs.”

Tish concedes that with a nod, and she glances longingly at the elevator doors. “Time to go home?”

“I haven’t done anything remotely like training in three days,” I point out. “Give me an hour.”

I get about forty-five minutes. I’m flowing through forms on a wing chun dummy when I’m distracted by yoga pants. Tish must have run out of emails to filter, because she is on the mats in upward-facing dog. And then downward-facing dog.

Well, that’s interesting.

“Hey.” I can’t help myself. “You want to practice some escape techniques?”

She grins, and she steps onto the mats with me.

For a few minutes, which must feel like a week to her, she tries everything I’ve taught her, and she even lands a few hits. Finally I wrap an arm around her, hand cupping the back of her head, and I squeeze her hard to my body and sink down into a lunge, bracing myself on one hand. She has no choice but to follow me to the floor, though she kicks the whole way, trying to overbalance me.

This is only my second favorite way to throw her on her back and pin her wrists over her head. “Now what are you going to do?”

She goes limp and sighs in annoyance. “From here, not much.”

Not good enough. Nowhere near good enough. “You’re going to have to figure something out.” I release her hands, and then I run my fingers up under her arms to where she is unbearably ticklish.

“No, don’t do that,” she says irritably, trying to squirm sideways and clamp her arm against her ribs.

“Stop me.”

She can’t.

At first it’s a light tickle, and she only squirms and says things like, “Stop it, that’s not funny.” Then it’s not so light, and she starts bucking underneath me, shoving my hands away, and yelling things like, “Get off me! I’m serious!”

Eventually, her face twists up in what looks like pain, and she says, “Red! Red, red, red.”

I stop instantly. Hands to myself, lift my weight an inch off her - everything. She draws her arms in close to her body, fists held protectively in front of her face, and for a moment she just lays there breathing hard.

“What was that supposed to prove?”

I was hoping to motivate her into doing some real damage. Maybe she’d remember how to shrimp out from under me. But, failing that - “Trust me for a little longer?”

She gives me a very put-upon look, but she nods.

“Put your arms over your head again.”

Very reluctantly, she obeys.

“Breathe deep and slow, all right? Just keep breathing, no matter what. Don’t tense up.” I start dragging my fingers down her side, and she shivers unpleasantly and makes a noise of protest. “Shh, relax. Let your shoulders melt into the mat. It’s not pain, right?”

Through gritted teeth, “No, but I hate it.”

“You can stay calm through it. Nothing bad’s going to happen to you.”

It feels powerful, pinning her to the floor and telling her what to do. Even more so to watch her actually do it. But what really gets me is the look on her face. Big, trusting eyes. She keeps her arms above her head, as ordered, and she watches my face and sucks down deep breaths. Forces herself not to twitch.

On the workbench, one of our phones buzzes. Not important right now.

“Nuh-uh, don’t tense up,” I murmur. “You’re alright, you’re doing fine.” And because I know what it does to her: “Good girl.”

She makes a needy noise that goes straight to some primal part of my brain.

“Shh.” Three more passes of my fingers up her ribs and under her arm, and we’re done. “See? Not so bad.”

Her eyes are half-lidded, and she sighs down into the mat. “Trying to cure me of ticklishness?”

Of course not. If I sneak up behind her and dig my fingers into her sides tomorrow, I’m sure she will shriek just as loud. “Your reflexes don’t get final say, is all.”

“Mmm.” She reaches up and twines her fingers together behind my neck. “And I suppose the things you thought were unbearable often aren’t, when it comes down to it.”

Exactly. “You were doing great, right up until I got you on the ground.” Given her pliant, dreamy expression, I’m guessing I can lay it on pretty thick - “And you were very good for me just now.”

Yep, there we go. She runs her hands down my back, and then she slides them under my shirt.

It’s almost too easy. A little manhandling, a pat on the head, and her whole body is begging for attention. It doesn’t feel sportsmanlike. Her deep and abiding need for validation is probably symptomatic of some serious daddy issues, and we should probably get to the bottom of that matter at some point. 

Then again, I know full well that Tish often nudges me in her preferred direction with food or back rubs or big, dewy eyes. Mostly,  I’m fine with it. She uses her powers for good, which gives me license to do the same. As long as she gets off on weird, paternalistic praise, I’m going to keep giving it to her.

“You did exactly what I asked.” I curve my hand around her neck. “My sweet girl.”

She pulls me down more insistently.

Two inches from a kiss, I shake my head. The problem with making out on the mats is that I sincerely doubt it will stop with making out. This is an open plan lair, to which multiple people have passcodes. One of whom is my mother.

“Please,” Tish whispers.

Well. Since she said please.

She gasps, and I muffle it with my mouth on hers. Her arms come up around me - okay, Miss Grabby Hands - and she slips me some tongue. I’ve been hard since I called her a good girl, and it feels like luxury to finally grind against her. I don’t want to just kiss her - I want to take her mouth, make her mine.

She wraps her legs around me, her heels dig into my lower back, and I don’t need forcing. I press against her  _ hard _ , and -

On the other side of the lair, the elevator doors whoosh open.

Tish and I scramble apart.

“Jon? I tried your cell,” my mother calls across the lair, and her heels click across the concrete floor. “Last minute client intake upstairs! Ordinarily I wouldn’t take an after-hours meeting, but it’s Paul, so I - oh.”

Tish has arranged herself in a neat lotus position, and I’ve got my knee up to obstruct the view of my lap. Everyone’s clothes are on. We look decent.

But I can tell by the way Mom’s hands flutter in front of her that she’s about to completely awkward up the works. “I’m interrupting, aren’t I?”

Yep. There it is. “Just a little grappling practice.”

She looks like she wants to scold us - she even raises one finger to do it - but instead she makes a moue. “You want to take a minute to change before you meet with clients?”

“Yeah, I’ll be right up.”

“Great. Paul’s here with his nephew, who probably dragged him here and shoved him in the front door.”

“His nephew, as in Julian?”

She grimaces. “That one.”

Julian has been a real pain in Dad’s ass since he returned from a few years abroad. Mayor Queen spent his first term in office welcoming biotech companies into the slowly revitalizing Canal Street corridor. The number of labs and research facilities that have moved in or started construction is either impressive or horrifying, depending on your politics. Dad’s development plans have faced opposition from the anti-gentrification people, the religious and environmental crazies, and Julian fucking Kord.

“Be nice,” Mom warns me. Then she  pauses, considering and reconsidering. Finally she says, “I hope you’ve been wiping the mats down after,” delicate pause, “grappling practice. There are Clorox wipes under my desk.”

“Yes,” I say through my teeth. “Thank you.”

Her heels click away again, and she disappears into the elevator. As soon as she’s gone, Tish groans and collapses onto my shoulder.

“It’s fine,” I sigh. “We’re all grownups here. She knows we bang.”

She nods into my shirt. “And in all likelihood your parents were the ones who christened these mats.”

“Wow, thanks. That was comforting.” I pat her back. “Come on, I’ve got to get presentable and talk to Paul.”

A few minutes later, I find Paul Kord standing quietly in the conference room with his hands in his pockets, looking faintly embarrassed to be there. It’s not the first time a client has come to us at the prodding of a concerned family member.

Julian gives a firm handshake and a practiced smile . “Jon, how long has it been?”

“Since your graduation, I think. That was a great party.”

His expression freezes for a half second, and belatedly I remember why that party was so good. I didn’t realize it was Julian’s room when I pulled my date in there.

All he says is a neutral, “Mmm, almost eight years.”

“Yeah, it’s been a while.” He’s spent the time since roving Africa with some NGO, consulting on medical infrastructure development in war-torn areas. That kind of work evidently involves a lot of social media photography, posing with lions and crap like that. “Good to see you again.”

With a much less flashy but much more sincere smile, Paul shakes my hand as well. “I didn’t get a chance to thank you on the scene last week. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t stepped in.”

Julian casts me a surprised look.

Paul nods at him. “Jon’s the reason I said it would have to be Panoptic, if it was going to be anyone.”

“I didn’t realize it was you at the funeral,” Julian says, and he gives me an unsubtle once-over.

I don’t know what to do with thank-yous, and I definitely don’t know what to do with Julian fucking Kord revising his incredibly valuable opinion of me on the spot.

Mom saves me from having to say anything. “Why don’t we all have a seat, and we can discuss your situation, Paul.”

All four of us get comfortable for what turns out to be a pretty standard intake interview. Julian does most of the talking, because extra security was obviously his idea. “We don’t know why my uncle was targeted, and it’s possible they’ll try again. I know I’ll sleep easier if professionals are keeping an eye on things.”

As Mom takes them through our usual battery of questions, I can already see where her mind’s going. Paul travels constantly for work, which makes him vulnerable in spaces that countless strangers have access to. Vetting and clearing each new hotel room is a pain in the ass.

“We’re going to recommend a close protection team,” I say as Mom winds down. “Ours work in pairs, and a lot of the time you’ll forget they’re there.”

Paul gives us a dry smile. “I had a bodyguard at the funeral, if you remember. The board insisted.”

“These aren’t security guards from corporate, standing around waiting for something to go wrong. Our team is valuable because they scope out spaces before you even set foot in them.”

“I’d like to introduce you to two of our close protection officers,” Mom says, tapping her nearby glassbook to summon Tish. “She’s our most experienced, and he’s our most frequently requested. They can explain how this might work a little more directly.”

A moment later, Tish leans her head in the door. She is back in her blouse and skirt, and she has smoothed her mussed hair into a demure bun.

Mom smiles. “Could you find Jones and Ramirez for us?”

“Of course.” She gives Paul a polite nod. “Good to see you, Mr. Kord.”

“And you,” he says warmly, and offers up a few pleasantries about Gotham that have her smiling more genuinely.

I don’t hear a word, because Julian is staring at her in a way that renders his face six times more punchable. I’m used to people taking second and third looks at my girlfriend, but they don’t usually do it in our place of work while sitting across the table from me.

At the same moment Mom presses her foot down on mine, Julian remembers himself and looks away.

Jones and Ramirez arrive soon after, and I don’t have to say another word to Julian fucking Kord for the remainder of the meeting. Paul takes an immediate liking to Jones, and he listens respectfully to Ramirez. All set, then. He’ll have 24/7 coverage starting this evening.

While they are still talking schedules, Julian makes his apologies and gets up to leave for a pressing dinner date. “Felicity, if you’ll excuse me.”

I bristle. The guy is only a few years older than me, and he barely knew my mother growing up. He has no business addressing her by her first name. But if she won’t enforce “Mrs. Queen,” I can’t exactly do it for her.

At a glance from Mom, I escort him to the doors, and almost immediately we run into Tish in the hall.

“Laetitia Cuvier, right?” he says, with the slightly too charming smile from all his obnoxious Facebook pictures. “I thought I recognized you.”

She glances uncertainly at me, and of course I’m no help at all. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”

“No, never.” He offers his hand. “Julian Kord. I’ve been hoping to talk to you for some time.”

Cautiously, she shakes it. “Oh?”

“How much do you know about Vitruvius?”

They are a direct descendant of the protest movement that coalesced in support of the Kobel Act a few years ago. Unlike the religiously-motivated enemies of genetic therapies, they attack this new biotech from the left. Genetic modification is poised to destroy all hope of an egalitarian society, they say. Sex-selective fertility treatments, eradication of stigmatized disabilities, etc. The only movie they’ve ever seen is  _ Gattaca _ .

Tish’s expression stays very carefully neutral. “I know I’ve seen your name in their press releases.”

He looks pleased. “I think you have a unique perspective on the issues, and there are a lot of people who’d be interested to hear it.”

“Thank you for saying so, but I’m not a bioethicist or a doctor or even very well-read on the subject.”

In a tone I do not appreciate, he says, “Experience can count for a lot.”

He means her last name is Cuvier, and whatever she says on the subject will generate page hits, no matter how inane. She’s connected to not one, but  _ two _ famous murderers by way of viral somatic gene therapy. To this day, she still receives the occasional death threat for her father’s crimes.

And here is this asshole, treating the whole thing like a marketing ploy.

A stranger might take Tish for indifferent when she says, “I really don’t have much to contribute to the debate.”

Right in front of me,  _ right fucking in front of me _ , Julian smiles rakishly and says, “Now that I don’t believe.”

She smiles back blandly. “It was nice to meet you. Excuse me, please.”

He twists to watch her go.

I clear my throat. “This way.”

He follows me to the doors, and I do not put his head through the glass. There’s my good deed for the day.

I find my girlfriend in Mom’s office, glassbook in hand, nodding along as they wrap up a few final details. “Also, Coleman Adler called,” Tish says. “Do you want that watch picked up tomorrow?”

Mom winces. “If you don’t mind. I know it’s not exactly work-related.”

Tish shrugs. “It frees you up to meet with the team from Ernst & Young.”

“Thanks, honey.” Another wince. “I mean, thank you, Tish.” She covers her eyes with her hand. “Ignore me. It’s late.”

“Yeah,” I say, reaching for Tish’s waist and trying to discreetly guide her toward the door. “We’d better get going.”

“Oh.” Eyes still closed, Mom works her fingertips over her temples. “One more thing.” She opens her eyes and aims a concerned frown at Tish. “Julian recognized you, didn’t he?”

“It was a little strange,” Tish admits. “Usually people know my name, not my face.”

I add: “Asshole wants to turn her into a mouthpiece for Vitruvius.”

Mom nods. “I didn’t think he’d be able to resist making the pitch, if he got the chance. Your story’s got everything, you know? Tragedy. Romance. Dramatic irony. It would definitely glue eyes to screens.”

“I told him I’m not interested,” Tish says quietly.

I’m not convinced that’s the last she’ll hear of it. Julian has probably taken entire business seminars on  _ getting to yes _ . “If he approaches you about it again, can I tell him to fuck off?”

Mom gives me a look, presumably because I’m talking about a client. “Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that.”

“Yeah, but if he gets pushy.” I shrug. “I’m good at telling people to fuck off.”

Tish goes up on tiptoe, and I obligingly bend my head to let her kiss my cheek. “The very best.”

“Go.” Mom shoos us out of her office. “Get out of here, go home.” Then she stifles a smile and adds, “Finish practice.”

Tish turns pink, and I hustle her out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Arrow pursues a lead on the Kord case, and things don't quite go as planned.

There’s a strange intimacy to close protection. You ask people for the details of their lives, for their vulnerabilities, for everything they value most. You have to know what you’re guarding to know how to prioritize. You learn a lot about a person by seeing what they reach to protect.

“It’s possible whoever’s after you will try to leverage the people you care about against you,” Mom tells Paul Kord in one of our earliest meetings. “In case of emergency, who do you want under the umbrella?”

“I suppose Julian would be the most obvious target, as he’s been staying with me since he’s been stateside. Maybe Kendall, my admin.” He chuckles. “She’s likely the person I spend the most time with.”

No children, and most of his close friends seem to be more like golfing buddies, all of whom have their own walled mansions with the latest security systems.

When pressed, he says, “I suppose anyone familiar with my history would know that I’m still close to Laurel.”

“A nephew, an administrative assistant, and an ex-wife,” I say in the privacy of Mom’s office, just as Tish appears in the doorway with a cup of coffee. “I guess it’s lonely at the top.”

Mom shrugs. “Depends on what kind of company you like. Paul is pretty happy hanging out with a roomful of prototype exoskeletons and pneumatic artificial muscles.”

“Oh, stop being judgy,” Tish says at the look on my face. “You’re pretty happy in a roomful of monkey bars and discarded tires. Mrs. Queen, the interpreter’s here. Darius is getting her some coffee.”

“I bet he is.” I reach for the mug in her hands. “Is that for me?”

She plays keepaway, and Mom says, “It most certainly is not.” With dignity, she sweeps past me and relieves Tish of the mug. “Come on. Roundtable meeting.”

Everyone assigned to the Kord case is waiting in the conference room. As usual for meetings bigger than just a couple of people, we’ve brought in a sign language interpreter for Sam, and as usual Jones is giving her his best smile. When she thinks no one else is looking, she smiles back.

Mom calls the meeting to order. “Darius, Ramirez, you’ve each worked a shift now. Any insight into our principal?”

This question comes standard, and what it really means is, How much haven’t we been told? No one ever gives up all their secrets to us on the first day, and personal acquaintances are even more likely to fudge the truth.

“I used to think Dad was exaggerating about that,” Elaine once told me when I complained to her. “Why lie to someone who’s trying to help you? Then I started working ER shifts, and it all made sense. They’re such stupid lies, too. ‘Of course I’m on my meds’ and ‘I’m not using, I swear to God!’ Do they not realize the tox screen is going to tattle on them?”

No one likes needing Panoptic’s help any more than they like needing stitches. I wouldn’t want a stranger skulking around my house either - especially if they expected me to make the disclosures on our standard questionnaire. I’d have to say things like, “There’s an unregistered SIG Sauer in my nightstand. Please don’t mention it to SCPD.” Or maybe, “Don’t freak out if you find a knife. I taped them under the counters all over the apartment.”

If history is any guide, at some point it would become necessary to clarify: “This isn’t what it sounded like. I’m not hurting her, I promise! Well, I am, but she asked me to.” That shit is always the most awkward for our operators.

“Mr. Kord is quiet and keeps to himself,” Ramirez reports. “The only two people with passcodes for his security system are Ms. Lance and his nephew. His nephew comes and goes at all hours, but never brings anyone else home. It’s the most orderly, predictable assignment I could ask for, really.”

“Dude’s a quality principal,” Jones agrees.

“Roy used to rave about him,” says Ramirez. “He said he didn’t have a favorite client, but it was definitely Paul.”

Mom smiles and turns to Chacko, who does a lot of coordinating with SCPD. “Have we got anything new on the mercenaries in custody?”

“Right now, the best guess is that they’re connected to the Paleologos family.”

Sam’s expression scrunches, and the interpreter says, “Beg pardon, could you spell that for me?”

Chacko obliges her, and for Sam’s benefit she goes on to explain, “They’re based out of Komnenoi, Markovia. They’ve built up a nice little empire - arms dealing, murder for hire, what have you. They don’t come cheap, either. Someone wanted this done right.”

“Theories on why?” I ask the table.

“How many ex-wives does he have?” says Jones.

“One,” Ramirez says tartly. “And she brought him homemade macaroni and cheese the other night.”

“They were _married_?”

“I don’t get it either.”

Ten minutes of spitballing, and we’ve expanded the list of obvious candidates - ransom, trade secrets, an especially operatic personal grudge - to include corporate power jockeying and elaborate stock market manipulation.

“Is the timing important?” Mom wonders aloud. “What’s going on right now that would make him a more attractive target?”

No one has an answer for that.

“I’ll take a closer look at our principal,” Mom concludes.

What she means is, I’ll violate his privacy and multiple federal laws. I know how she works.

Another twenty minutes of housekeeping, and Mom says, “All right, that’s all I’ve got for you guys today. Let’s all get back to it.”

Chairs squeak and glassbooks click. Across the table from me, Jones leans back, crosses his arms, and looks at the interpreter thoughtfully. Clearly and distinctly, he says, “Kumquat.”

The interpreter looks back at him blankly for a moment. Then, dutifully, she raises her hand, and her fingers move in strange shapes, spelling it out.

Sam’s face is priceless.

The interpreter just points at Jones, who frowns in disappointment.

“Kumquat. The fruit. It’s a funny word. Not funny in sign language though, which is kind of a letdown,” Jones says, and the interpreter’s hands start moving again. “How about turtle?”

The interpreter bites down on the inside of her cheek, and she covers one fist with her hand. Her thumb pokes out from under the “shell,” and she wiggles it side to side, as if it’s on a quest for lettuce.

Sam punches Jones in the arm.

“Darius,” Mom says from the head of the table. “She’s an interpreter, not your performing monkey.”

Jones watches carefully until she gets to the end of the sentence, and he grins. “Is that monkey?” He mimics her, scratching his sides. “Aw, that’s funny. Can I see that again?”

Mom glares at him. “No, you may not.”

She’s wearing her disapproving mom face. I can’t resist. “Monkey.”

The interpreter signs it, as she must. Jones and Sam both snort and hide their faces behind their hands.

Mom points right at my chest. “Get out of my conference room. Right now.”

I call McGinnis with this non-update, mostly to check in. We have a brief, shallow conversation almost exclusively about work. He hasn’t turned up much. Max hasn’t turned up much. None of us has a single useful thing to say.

Just before the office clears out for the evening, Sam shows up in my office looking nervous. “The shell company that was leasing the Gulfstream,” he says. “The one that dead-ended in Singapore?”

I gesture him into a chair. “Yeah?”

“I figured out who really owns the plane. It’s a Markovian shipping company.”

“How do you know?”

The nerves intensify. “It only took a little more digging, is all.”

“More digging,” I say neutrally. I’ve found, over the course of dozens of interrogations, that repeating someone’s words back to them in an unimpressed voice is a great way to get them to elaborate.

“It was on my personal computer,” he says. “Nothing that can get traced back to Panoptic.”

I chuckle. “That kind of digging? Nice."

He smiles in relief.

"All right, what's this company called?"

“Magiras Line, out of Komnenoi.”

“I know the name,” Dad says at dinner. He and Mom couldn’t help talking shop. “When I was working in Markovia, the Paleologos family didn’t own the company, but they owned the people who did.”

“How do you know?” says Tish, who never used to ask him about his past.

He shrugs. “That’s what their logistics coordinator said when I broke his wrist.”

Mom helpfully mouths, “Bratva,” for those of us who struggle with basic inferential reasoning.

“The men in custody aren’t going to talk,” Dad says decidedly. “They know American law enforcement can’t do anything to them that’s worse than what their boss would do.”

“Like what?”

“The last time one of his wet work specialists turned on him, Adrian Paleologos had him tied naked to a chair. Then he went to work with pliers and shears.”

Dad coerced a name out of one of Paleologos’ people. Whatever happened to the logistics coordinator afterwards, I hope he had it coming.

“They have a distribution hub here in Starling,” Mom says, tapping at her glassbook. Then she looks up at me. “You ready to work tonight?”

After dinner, she and Tish and I head down to the lair. They’ll keep me company and keep me oriented while I do some light recon.

Tish doesn’t work Watchtower, exactly. She is not and never will be an IT specialist, and she’ll never hack any satellites or Interpol databases for me. But for basic mission control and keeping me updated, her sure, calm voice and unflappable style are damn near perfect.

While I suit up, she slips something into my left breast pocket and goes up on tiptoe for a kiss. “Be careful.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Watchtower sends me to a walled complex that takes up an entire block of the St. Stephen corridor, close to the old wharf that Dad started redeveloping soon after he took office. Mom can see a lot from borrowed satellites, but there is no substitute for sneaking around looking at shit.

“These aren’t run of the mill security guards,” I report, after half an hour of scoping it out. “They’ve got sidearms, they’ve got dogs, they’ve got every damn thing. I’d say we’ve hit paydirt.”

“Cameras?” Mom says.

“Every ten paces,” I confirm.

Mom sighs. “Come on home, and we’ll do this another time when we’re better equipped.”

“We can fritz the cameras out.” If I place my shot correctly, Mom can scramble the feed to loop the last few uneventful minutes for whoever might be watching. “Poof, I'm invisible.”

“I'm saying there are too many. How many chipped arrowheads are you carrying?”

I run a quick inventory of my quiver. “Three prepped, and I can fix up another dozen right now.”

“Not gonna cut it.”

I crouch down, unsling my quiver, and start affixing Mom’s microchips to my remaining arrowheads.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she sighs.

I gear up again and get to my feet. I take aim at the first camera, just slightly to the right, within that five inch radius…

There we go.

It's slow going, waiting out passing security guards and timing my shots. The cameras cost me six arrows in under thirty yards. Of the eighteen remaining, three are tipped with explosives and do not belong in people. Mom calls them remodelers, “for installing doors and windows where there previously were none.”

“That's kinda lame. I'm not calling them that.”

“You're lame,” she grumbled.

One arrow, the last and most important, is my trusty GTFO grappling hook. Supplies are limited, is what I'm saying.

“Another one on the northwest corner,” Mom says.

“God damn it.”

“I told you.”

The tedium of it is dangerous; losing focus could mean a slip-up. Finally I get close to an entrance point, blocked only by a dog and handler.

Some of my flechettes are tipped with a sedative. I make the throw: the dog first. The tranq will take long enough for me to drop the handler too, and in the meantime the dog can’t get on the radio and announce to everyone, “I believe I’ve been struck by a flechette loaded with a sedative.”

At the yelp, the handler kneels down solicitously and starts checking paws for broken glass. Good for her; she doesn’t have as far to fall when I tranq her too.

Sneak, sneak, sneak, and I’m down to four arrows, excepting the specialty heads. The server room is locked, naturally, and Mom talks me through disabling the keypad, even though I’ve used her little decryptor six or seven times before.

“All right, I'm in. Terminal, terminal, terminal - here we go.” I reach into my side pocket and go briefly cold when I find it empty. “Where the fuck is the - ”

“Left breast pocket,” Tish supplies, and when I dig, I find the drive there.

“Thanks, baby.” I slip it into the terminal.

I hear fingers on keys, and after a pause I don’t care for, Mom says, “It'll just take a minute to backdoor the server access.”

If the looped security feed gives me away - the same leaf blowing across the screen over and over again, for instance - I'll be stuck deep in here when they bust out the armed search party. The longer I'm here, the more likely someone notices one of the seventeen arrows lodged in the walls.

“Sure, I'll just hang out in the middle of the heavily fortified compound. It's cool.”

“Who told you tonight was not our night, Arrow?”

Footsteps.

“Watchtower…”

“Working on it,” Mom says in a light, airy customer service voice. “Copying the data and purging the access logs.”

“Mm hmm.” Hunker down. I'm a sneaky bastard, but I'm no great shakes at hiding. In full battle rattle, I'm 220 pounds of leather bristling with weaponry.

“Sixty seconds,” Mom whispers.

The door opens, which feels unfair.

I keep low, sedative at the ready. Handling the guard will not be a problem. The trick is to do it quietly.

I let him turn the corner. Then I ghost up behind him, clamp a gloved hand over his mouth, and muffle his shout of surprise. Prick him with the sedative, hold him in an iron grip, try to keep him from kicking anything computery and expensive. Wait and wait until he slumps down.

His earpiece buzzes faintly. “Jackson?” a voice says. “Jackson, you there?”

Fuck fuckety fuck.

“Watchtower, is it done?”

“Two seconds. Two more. Okay, _now_.”

I slip the drive free, zip it into a pocket, and reset the terminal. Time to go.

I leave fast and sloppy, expecting every second to hear gunshots or to feel one slam into my back. Behind me, shouts echo from the concrete walls. Even more ominously, so does deep, fierce barking.

The window at the far end of the hall overlooks the street, and beyond is the grayed, moss-infested concrete wall of a shipyard’s offices. If I can make it across before they’ve pinned down my location, I’m home free.

I smash the glass, and my GTFO arrow buries itself high in the opposite wall. I swing away, another brush with disaster narrowly averted by my daring heroics.

Then the old concrete crumbles, and my anchor point comes loose.

It only drops me the last eight or ten feet, but that is plenty when you’re not expecting it. My bad leg, the one a team of surgeons once pieced back together, crumples under me. I can’t yell and give myself away. There is nothing more pathetic than a tiny, whispered, “Fuck!” when you’re laying in a gravel alley.

“Are you all right?” Tish says on comms.

“Hang on, let me see.” I give it a few experimental steps, and I bite down on more cursing. “Gonna take me a little longer to get back to the bike.”

“I’m so sorry, honey,” says Mom.

“Why?”

“I should’ve thought of running the stupid thing as a lightlink, not a traditional glass. The new kid and I were talking about it just this morning, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it until I’d already tried analyzing the back-reflections three times.”

“Of course,” Tish says mildly. “A lightlink. Obviously.”

Mom makes a noise of deep dissatisfaction. “Arrow, how bad is it really?”

“My knee is kind of touchy. Not your fault the anchor point gave way.” I’m not in the mood to jump from rooftop to rooftop, so I’m stuck weaseling around at ground level.

“By the way, we’ve discussed this before,” Tish says, trying to add some levity. “My callsign is not Baby.”

“How about Buttercup?” Silence. “Sweetcheeks?” More silence. “My little cabbage.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.” After four years I have finally figured out what mon petit chou means. “Turnabout is fair play.”

“It is more accurately translated as ‘creampuff,’” she says primly.

“I’ll think of something.”

Tish sighs in defeat. “Oh, God.”

On every step, the twinge in my knee tightens into something nastier. I might have to take this one to Dr. Perrin.

On the corner of St. Stephen, I hear a scream. It’s a woman’s voice, and it sounds more like rage than fear.

“Watchtower?”

“The city has never fixed those cameras. No eyes for us.”

Maybe it’s nothing. I’m down to three usable arrows, and I’m injured. The bike is a block away.

“Get off me!” the woman shrieks.

“I’ve already called it in to SCPD.”

But I can’t just keep walking. They’re around the corner from me.

A woman is backed up against a car with four men crowding in, either yanking at her purse or just pawing at her and laughing at her anger. I recognize her. She’s one of Maggie’s girls, whom she’s warned repeatedly not to take calls in this area. West of General Pershing Street, Maggie has an understanding with the neighborhood gangs, but here there’s no guarantee they’ll be left alone.

“SCPD nearby?” I ask Watchtower.

There’s a pause, and it’s Tish who answers. “Five minutes, maybe.”

I guess I’m going in.

There are four guys, and near as I can tell, only one is carrying. He’s one of the two hanging back, watching with their arms crossed, and his shirt hikes up at the waistband. The guy who just made another grab at the girl’s shirt is going to be first. Armed dude is going to draw on me the second his friend hits the ground, conveniently offering me my second target. And the shithead who just darted in and rucked up her dress? He’s getting an arrow in the ass.

I don’t need to take them out completely. If the girl has any sense, she’ll be in her car and screeching away before I fire my third shot.

Here we go.

For about four seconds, the plan goes exactly as intended. Nock, draw, loose - nock, draw, loose - and it’s beautiful. Two guys screaming on the ground, the gun skittering away across the pavement.

“In the car, now!” I bellow at the girl, who stands frozen right in front of her car door. She jumps, fumbles in her purse, and the car’s lights beep-beep to life.

Lucky for me, neither of the two remaining men realizes that she’s their best leverage. They’re on the ground with their buddies, loudly and profanely freaking out over the 29” of carbon fiber suddenly sprouting out of them.

The girl leaps into her car, slams the door behind her, and floors it.

Which leaves me with two of the Three-Sixteen still in tip-top shape, scared and pissed-off and glaring right at me. The only satisfaction left to them is taking a chunk out of me before we’re done here.

And now I’m out of arrows and backpedaling on a bad knee.

“Watchtower? Where’s SCPD?”

“Two minutes.”

“Shit.” The two guys getting to their feet are going to be on me in six seconds.

I reach for the GTFO arrow. Scan for a target - fire escape, something at a halfway decent angle, come on, come on, come on -

They’re almost on me. I whip the bow right across the first one’s face, and he stumbles sideways, reeling.

For a little while, I think maybe I’ll be alright. Both of them are running on rage, and they don’t know how to coordinate as a team. They keep getting in each other’s way.

Then I twist too fast on my knee, and pain blinds me for a half second. I take a clumsy extra step, and a knife rips down my arm and lays the kevlar bare. It’s designed for impact, not edged weapons, and it doesn’t stand up well to long slashes like that.

Something slams into the back of my head and takes me to my hands and knees.

My bow crunches on the gravel, and my vision blurs. Nauseating pain reverberates through my head, sends all my thoughts sideways. One thought coalesces: they’ve got me on the ground with a bad concussion. Even before the first kick in the ribs, I know how completely fucked I am.

My suit saves me from any cracked bones, but the kick still slams me sideways onto the asphalt. I curl up to protect my head, and even that instinctive movement feels sluggish. Braced for the second blow.

There’s a thud, a sick snapping noise, and a scream. But it isn’t me.

I look up blearily at a dark-haired shape in a bright yellow T-shirt, crouched over one of the Three-Sixteen and pounding at him relentlessly. The other is on his knees, fumbling around in the mouth of the storm drain with one hand, holding the other close to his body. It takes me a very long few seconds to figure out what the hell he’s doing.

The gun didn’t slip neatly into the sewer system. It’s caught in the grating.

I scramble to my knees, and the ground rocks under me. I raise the bow, grope for an arrow.

Focus. Force my eyes to focus.

Nock, draw - that part is automatic. But the arrowhead sways like I’m kneeling on the deck of a ship.

He pulls the gun free and adjusts his grip. Starts to turn.

My arrow takes him in the side, just above his hip. He screams and collapses against the curb, dropping the gun to prop himself up. Stares at the fletched shaft growing out of him.

“Oh, shit!” someone yells to my left, and then a figure in a white T-shirt takes off running.

The kid in yellow visibly considers chasing him, then shakes off the notion and jogs over to the guy bleeding into the storm drain. Picks up the gun, releases the magazine and tosses it very thoroughly into the drain. Pockets it, looks distastefully at the moaning, cursing man up against the curb.

I let myself fall forward onto my hands, and dizziness hits me hard. Too much noise, too much happening at the same time. There’s a voice in my ear saying, “How badly are you hurt?”

Tish. I’m trying very hard to answer her, but it’s only even odds my mouth is moving. “Head injury,” seems important to get across. So does, “I’m sorry, baby,” because I’ve probably scared the shit out of her.

“Shhh.” Her voice softens, like maybe she knows how badly my head hurts. “It’s all right, we’re coming to get you.”

I glance up, and the kid is approaching me the way I’ve approached badly abused pit bulls chained up in gang members’ yards.

“Hey, um. I think you’re kind of bad off.”

Sharp eyes, kid. I am, in fact, swaying on my hands and knees. My head does, in fact, feel like a cherry tomato that someone stepped on.

He crouches down a respectful distance away. “You need help?”

I need everyone, including the malfunctioning muffler a block over, to shut the hell up so I can think through how to get out of here clean. Watchtower is going to need me away from the scene before they can extract me. I close my eyes, swallow back nausea, and breathe deep.

First question: “What’s your name?”

“Emanuel.”

“Emanuel. Got to be honest, I might not remember it later. Can you get home okay?”

“Can I - ? Well, you know. Respectfully. I’m not the one with the concussion.”

Funny he should mention. “Hold that thought. I need to puke.”

He gives me a little ‘go ahead’ gesture.

When I’ve retched up a little puddle of foamy nastiness, and I’ve turned the air blue, I wipe my mouth and turn my focus back to the kid. “Where’d you come from?”

“I live here. What are you doing in this neighborhood?”

I am the shadow that stalks the night. I’m the danger that haunts the dangerous. Can he not see the mask and the hood and the drop dead gorgeous compound bow? “Arrow.”

“Yeah,” he says with a bobblehead nod I used to see on pledges during hell week. “I know.” He glances over his shoulder at the guy on the curb, whose moans have subsided to whimpers. There are sirens in the distance. “You need to get out of here, don’t you?”

“We’re coming right now,” Tish says softly in my ear. “Can you make it a block west to the alley behind the old post office?”

The world won’t stay still long enough for me to remember which way is west. “Baby, I don’t think that’s gonna work.”

The kid frowns at me faintly, and then he nods, just once and very slowly. “Whoever’s coming for you, I can get you to them.” He jerks his head over his shoulder at our friend in the gutter. “Away from him.”

I look him over. He’s about five-nine, broad across the shoulders, with full sleeves of tattoos. His eye-stabbingly yellow shirt says, in small block letters, Ephesians 2:8. And he just saved my life. “Thank you.”

He takes my thanks as preemptive, and he comes around to my side and gets his shoulder under my arm. “All right, one two three, _up_.” Firmly he drags me to my feet, and I hold tight to the bow and try not to puke again. He bears up well under my weight. “Which way are we going?”

“West. The old post office.”

We stagger down the street, and every step jolts all the way up my spine and pounds through my head.

“Under a minute,” Tish says quietly.

“Shadows,” I mutter to the kid as we turn into the alley. “And tell me your name one more time.”

“Emanuel.”

The van lumbers around the corner, and the door glides open soundlessly. A small, hooded figure crouches in the back, drowning in one of Watchman’s gray jackets over her yoga pants. At the very last second, I remember not to call her by name, and at her beckoning I tumble awkwardly toward her.

Another hooded figure, whose head barely comes up to the headrest, is at the wheel. Scrunched up very close to the wheel, actually. Hey, Mom.

Tish gathers me toward her, and I collapse gratefully against nice, soft girlfriend. “Hey, thank him again for me,” I mutter.

“He knows. I’ve got you.”

I curl up around the pain, blocking out the engine’s rumble, and next thing I know the van is in motion. Small hands move over me, and with some difficulty Tish lifts my head and shoulders into her lap and eases back the hood.

“I need you to stay conscious, all right?” she says softly. “Just for a little while longer.”

“Take off that hood, let me see you. Yeah, that’s better.” I’m pretty sure I’m bleeding on her leggings, and every rock of the van exacerbates my nausea. Grinning hurts, and so does waggling my eyebrows. “Oh, hey. Look at you, pretty girl. You single?”

A smile. One unambiguous win for tonight.

“No? Your boyfriend know you’re here?”

“That’s right, you just lay here and tell jokes and stay awake for me.” Her fingers gently probe the back of my head, and they stop when she finds blood. “Keep talking.”

Instead I rock sideways in her lap and dry-heave a few times.

“Everybody all right back there?” Mom calls.

“Close enough,” Tish answers, and we rumble on home.

 

It takes a couple of days to walk off the concussion.

The first night, Elaine Diggle comes to shine lights in my eyes, do torturous things to my knee like bend it forty-five degrees, and declare me “a hot mess.”

Pain makes me grumpy. “They teach you big fancy words like that in med school?”

She takes a seat on the tall stool next to the med table, folding her hands in her lap. “You know the drill. Go home, get some sleep, and take the knee to your orthopedist tomorrow.”

I reach for her hand to pat it, and I miss. I still end up with her leg. “Thanks, Lainie. I know you said never again.”

Elaine doesn’t smile. “Never is a long time.”

Even with the ceiling swaying overhead, I can feel Mom and Tish watching us carefully.

“It’s a tough spot you put me in, kiddo,” Elaine says on a sigh. “I absolutely should not be doing this, but the alternative scares me more.”

Gonna have to open my eyes for this one. Maybe even sit up.  “Nobody twisted your arm.”

“You’re family,” she says matter-of-factly. “What am I going to tell you? No?”

“Well, if I’m not dying, you should probably go home. I hear newborns need a lot of attention.”

“She’s asleep.” Finally, Elaine cracks a smile. “God willing, she stays that way.”

I get a kiss on the head, and then Elaine gathers her purse, says her goodbyes to Mom and Tish, and heads for the elevator.

Which leaves two nearly identical concerned expressions aimed at me.

My head pounds. “What?”

“That was a close call,” Mom says. “If that kid hadn’t shown up, we’d be having a very different evening right now. As it is, he got way too close a look at your face, didn’t he?”

“I know him a little bit,” Tish says. “Emanuel Richmond. He was at Bridge House when I was doing my practicum there, and he’s still good friends with Cornell Hunt.”

Cornell was one of Ted Grant’s mentees, whom Jolie Page profiled in her long-form article on the Arrow a couple years ago. He’s a couple years older than me, and he made it out of the Glades to become a sous chef at Antoine’s.

“I think all those guys remembered Roy very fondly,” Tish adds.

Mom opens her mouth to fuss at me some more, and I hold up a hand. “Can we do this when I’m not concussed?”

She bites her lip and crosses her arms. “Yes.” She drums her fingers on her forearm. “Yes, we can do this when you’re not concussed.

“I’ll get him home,” Tish says quietly.

“He’s heavy,” Mom sighs. “I’ll help.”

I don’t really remember how they got me to my penthouse apartment, except that it hurt.

I spend most of the weekend on the sofa, telling Tish, “I need ice cream. I need a Purple Heart.” Instead she brings me tea and real food and ice packs, and she curls up with me while we catch up on emails and news updates.

Turning over in my arms, she rubs her forehead against my cheek. “You’re scratchy.”

“I think the word you're looking for is manly.”

“Scruffy.”

The only thing to do is to bury my face in her neck, rub my stubble all over her, and then blow a good solid raspberry against her skin. She giggles and shrieks, which means I win.

For the rest of the weekend, my head aches dully and my knee twinges at every wrong move, but it is only background noise. Pain and I have come to an understanding. I nap while Tish goes to her dance class, and when she comes home, we cook together. It feels decadent, just mincing garlic next to her and having all the hours until Monday.

“Of course I don’t want you to get hurt,” Tish says in the shower on Sunday morning, “but it is pretty much the only time we can do this.”

Leaning against the cold tile wall to take weight off my knee, I work conditioner into her hair. I suspect my fingers are not as thorough as hers, but she likes having it done for her. “Yeah, I get it. I like it too.” It’s all well and good that I would kill or die for her, but sometimes the important thing is to comb the tangles out of her hair.

She leans into my hands and muses,“I wonder what it would be like to get sick of you.”

“You’ll find out.” I run my hands down her sides, and she leans back against me, all hot and slippery and sweet-smelling. “I am confident that you will find out.”

Just not this evening, she won’t. I let my hand slide down low.

In the red afternoon light, I wake from a doze at the feel of fingertips skimming my ribs. Tish still lies head to foot with me, kissing my hip, and right next to my shoulder her thighs are rubbing together. If she is asking for round two, that is... probably not going to happen. My head hurts again, possibly from her sitting on it.

“Baby, spoon up and let me hold you.”

She obeys, as she usually does when we’re naked, and she is careful of my knee when she fits her legs to mine. I fall into another shallow dream. When I surface again a few minutes later, it feels like we have always been here, breathing slow and even on sheets that smell of her shampoo.

“Why don’t I quit both my jobs?” I murmur sleepily. “We can do this all the time.”

She turns over in my arms. “Don’t joke about that.”

“We’ll spend a year in France.” It sounds golden and faraway and almost possible, in this mood. She has always wanted to go, and I have never spent more than a couple weeks outside of Starling. “Rent something in Paris with, I don’t know. Ambiance. Lay in bed and eat croissants and have sex all day.”

“No, we’d want the south of France,” she says, warming to the fantasy. “Maybe Provence in lavender season, or a house by the sea.”

Right, sure, wherever. The important part is, “To eat croissants and have sex all day.”

She laughs and kisses my nose. “Come on, let’s get dressed for dinner.”

As usual when Milena makes beef tenderloin, a motley crew has shown up to my parents’ house.

Elizabeth Diggle is the guest of honor, as she has been at every one of her previous appearances. She is the first person in a generation to show up wearing tiny, tiny socks and a bow clipped to her curls, so naturally everyone is making fools of themselves.

By everyone, I mostly mean Mom and Aunt Thea.

Dig is in town, and he regards his granddaughter with far more pride than you would think possible for someone who cannot yet sit up unassisted. Lyla is still in Khartoum, and he’ll fly out to rejoin her next week. “Grandma wanted to come home and see you too, baby girl,” he tells Lizzie, settling her on his shoulder. “But she drew the short straw.”

“I thought Mom didn’t want to be ‘Grandma,’” Elaine says. “We settled on ‘Nonna,’ didn’t we?”

“I’m talking to a three month old,” Dig says, pulling a face for Lizzie. “Let’s not get hung up on the details.”

Eight of us range around the dining room table, and over mixed greens and beef tenderloin and fingerling potatoes, we catch up on the past few months. Dig and Lyla have been all across North Africa, working on _mumble mumble cough_ , and oh, by the way, “You guys know the Kord kid, right? Julian.”

I do not look at Tish, and I do not make a face.

“We ran into him a few times in Khartoum. He’s doing good work with those clinics.”

Aunt Thea grimaces and shakes her head. “Still don’t like him. Sorry.”

Thank you. You were always my favorite aunt.

“All those letters after his name, and he can’t tell the difference between my basically functional spinal cord and, like, _Gattaca_.”

“I can’t believe we’re still having this debate,” Elaine says. “Since the medical establishment took over viral somatic genetic modification, there hasn’t been a single documented case of a serious ethical breach.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” Dig points out. “And all the laws surrounding it might have something to do with that.”

“Like it or not, the technology exists. When have we ever successfully shoved a genie back in the bottle?”

“Mustard gas,” Dig fires back. “You don’t see nearly as much chemical warfare as people might have predicted round about 1917.”

“Polyester,” Aunt Thea supplies. “We shoved that one back in hard.”

“So where do we shove Kord?” I say before I can help myself.

“Back to Sudan, if we’re lucky,” Dad grumbles.

“Sorry, my love,” Mom says, pouring him more wine. “He’s here for at least six months to, ah, ‘focus on his activism and engage with the community.’” Then she tells a quick and obvious fib, to distract from the fact that she undoubtedly learned this information in the course of a client intake interview. “Paul and I had lunch the other day.”

Dig gives her a look. Just a casual lunch between you and Paul Kord two days after his heavily publicized attempted kidnapping? Sure, it was.

“Aw, Ollie,” Aunt Thea groans. “Six more months of YouTube videos about how you’re selling Starling out to biotech companies?”

“It’s the way he says it,” Dad grouches. “‘Biotech.’ That self-righteous face he makes.”

Dad has always resented competition from other people’s self-righteous faces. It must be maddening to have a photogenic thirty-one year old talking shit all over Uptown Messenger.

“You’re armed. You’ve got buzzwords too,” Mom points out. “The new university medical complex has revitalized the whole Broadmoor neighborhood. High-paying jobs. Innovation. Technology. All that stuff sounds really sexy.”

I raise my eyebrows at Dad. “Not sure you want this to come down to who’s sexier.”

Mom narrows her eyes at me. “Excuse you.”

As we linger at the table, Lizzie starts to fuss, and Dig low-key bundles her up and takes her on a little walk to quiet her down. The conversation has turned to Jodie’s maternity leave, which involves more information than I need about pumping schedules and soreness. I make myself scarce and follow Dig out onto the veranda.

He gives me a look of appraisal as I hobble over to a wicker chair. “You gonna get that knee looked at?”

I give him only an irritable grunt.

His eyebrows do eloquent things. “Lainie told you to get it looked at.”

I sink down heavily. “Which I will do promptly and without further nagging.”

He cracks a smile, and he goes back to pacing the edge of the veranda. “After this last month in Khartoum, Lyla and I are going to be back here a lot more. It’ll be good to see you on the regular again.”

“Are you, ah…” I’ve never asked too many questions about this, because they didn’t feel welcome. “Are you retiring again some more?”

“Something like that.”

I gesture to Lizzie, who is making angry, tired hiccups on his shoulder as her tears subside. “I guess you’ve got an extra reason to be home now.”

“Yeah, they change the landscape when they show up.” He chuckles, almost to himself. “You notice your mom and dad got out of the life just as soon as they could when you came along.”

“What?”

His smile fades. “You knew that.”

I knew those two things happened around the same time, but I always kind of assumed the arrow of causation pointed from retirement to me, not the other way around. When I asked Dad why he hung up the hood, he took a long time to think about it, and his answer started with, “There were a lot of reasons, and it was a complicated decision.” He did not look me in the eyes and say, “Well, see,  _you_ were born.”

“Things were going well,” I paraphrase what he told me. “Under Captain Lance, SCPD was getting a handle on the worst of the violent crime, and Laurel’s office was making strides. At some point, an unaccountable vigilante who might contaminate evidence or raise awkward questions in court… well, that turned into more of a hindrance than a help.” I swallow. “At least, that’s the story I heard.”

“Yeah.” Dig nods thoughtfully. “Yeah, that was all true.”

But it wasn’t the whole truth.

He keeps pacing the veranda, slow and steady, rocking Lizzie faintly on his shoulder. “You know why I pulled back, after that spring when the mansion burned down?”

“I didn’t realize you had.” As far as I knew, he was neck-deep in the team for as long as there was one. He certainly jumped back in quick enough when I started running around in green.

“More mission control, less field work,” Dig confirms. “By the time Panoptic was off the ground in ‘16, I was more of an ally than a partner.” He takes a long sip of his iced tea, and he leans back in his chair and laces his fingers together thoughtfully in front of his mouth. “See, it wasn’t just my life I was gambling anymore.”

“Elaine?”

“There was a night when Ra’s al Ghul had my baby girl for six hours. Carried her around on his hip. The whole time, he was as gentle with her as Lyla or I would have been. Even when he was threatening to smash her skull in if we didn’t do as he said.”

I look at the fuzz-covered head on his shoulder. “Son of a bitch.”

Dig hikes his granddaughter higher, and he ambles around for another pass. “I sometimes wonder, if she’d been old enough to remember that night, whether she ever would have trusted us again.”

“Trusted _you_?”

“We put her in the line of fire.”

“Seems like the psychotic mass murderer with delusions of grandeur did that.”

Slowly, he shakes his head. “There are enemy combatants, and then there are just - _enemies_. That’s what Lyla and I found out, our first few years after we got discharged. With ARGUS, with the Arrow. The people shooting at you aren’t just aiming at your ACUs.”

“At your what?”

“Army Combat Uniforms.”

“Right.” Dig is a considerate man, and he doesn’t throw jargon at the uninitiated. But with a few select people, he forgets that he is not in the company of veterans. “I don’t speak Army,” Uncle Roy used to gripe in meetings, when Dig and Lyla really got going. “Quit talking in letters.”

I guess these days I’m one of the few select people. I squelch a smile, because he’s leaning toward me looking extra serious.

“The kind of people the Arrow pisses off don’t believe in the phrase ‘nothing personal,’” he says. “They will make it personal - as personal as it gets. If all of that came back on a little girl who was only mixed up in it because of choices we made?” He shakes his head faintly. “It absolutely would have been on us.”

I just barely manage to restrain myself from saying, “I don’t think that’s how ethics work.” Nothing pisses off a parent like a childless twenty-something talking shit.

But none of this quite fits the story I heard, admittedly piecemeal and _Rashomon_ -style from everyone involved, over those first couple of years after they brought me in.“I thought you were the one who convinced my dad it was even possible to have a life and a family alongside the vigilante stuff. He was all set to jerk off every night and die alone, and then you and Lyla started going, ‘Nope, here’s how it’s done.’”

Dig chuckles. “Kids are different. Kids change everything.”

We don’t stay on the veranda long after that. After the first mosquito bite, we rejoin the rest of the family at the table.

“Now let’s see about cutting this beef one-handed,” Dig says, shifting Lizzie to his other shoulder.

Tish shifts in her seat and says hopefully, “I can take her for a minute.”

“You hear that?” Dig says, pressing a kiss to Lizzie’s head and handing her over. “Go by Miss Tish. Here we go.”

“Regarde Jon, ma petite. Il fait les meilleurs grimaces,” Tish says. “Regarde-le, he’s going to do one now.”

It’s true. Babies love me. I make one stupid face, and they think I'm a comedic genius.

We keep the kid occupied until after-dinner drinks. Lizzie and I end up blowing raspberries at each other. The baby is the only person who has found this entertaining in literally years, so I’m in no hurry to stop.

“Jon, what can I make you?” Aunt Thea calls from the wet bar, summoning us to the living room.

“Warm milk.” I scoop the baby up and gesture Tish toward the sofa. Little kicky legs make this awkward, and I have to rearrange Lizzie against my chest a few times to get situated. She makes grumpy burbly noises, and I bounce her faintly the way Dig did on the veranda. “An Old Fashioned for the kid.”

“I’ll give her an extra cherry.”

I glance at Tish to ask what she wants, but she’s staring at me like I’ve just rattled off the activation code to her ovaries.

Well, that’s interesting.

“I can take her back, if you want your hands free,” Elaine offers as we get settled in. “She might be a little overstimulated.”

No, I’m holding onto anything that makes my girlfriend look at me like that. “We’ll be nice and quiet over here.”

Lizzie blows a few final angry bubbles, and her tiny fist waves a little more slowly. I offer my index finger, and she gives it a couple of clumsy bumps and then grabs hold. She frowns up at Tish, and on each blink her eyelids get a little heavier.

From the loveseat opposite, Mom and Dad are watching us intently.

God damn it, keep your knowing smiles to yourself.

I have always vaguely assumed that kids would happen for me someday, and it’s not like Tish and I have never discussed it. The night before Abby left for college, Tish and I stayed up late after dinner at my parents’ house, lounging in my old room. I forget how the subject drifted from Mom and Dad as empty nesters to having a family someday, but I remember her smile when she told me, “I’ve always thought you’d be a good father.”

“Always” was probably an overstatement. She probably did not think that when I was flirting with functional alcoholism. Had anyone mentioned babies then, she might have told them that I wouldn’t be a responsible enough father if my kid were born with a briefcase and a full-time job.

But that night in my old room, I smiled back at Tish and said, “I can teach them to drive.”

Her smile turned wry. “No, you may not.”

“We should have girls,” I said, only half-joking. “Definitely girls. A couple of tiny Tishes, playing dress-up and directing Barbie soap operas.”

“I wouldn’t want to preselect the sex,” said her years of Catholic school. “I’d rather take what God gives us.”

“So if I get myself off the naughty list between now and knocking you up–”

She put a pillow over my face. “He is not Santa Claus. Also, if you ever call it that again, I will not permit you to do it.”

It’ll happen when it happens. My parents can shut up smirking.

Tish takes a turn holding the kid, and Lizzie sulks her way to sleep, resisting the pull of her heavy eyelids to the last moment. When she finally drops off, Tish gives me a smile and lays her head on my shoulder contentedly.

It’s not a bad look on her. Not at all.

  



	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still on the slow road to recovery, Jon has multiple conversations he does not wish to have, plus one he does.

“Another concussion,” says Dr. Perrin, in a tone of resignation.

Dad’s longtime doctor now treats my “extreme sports” injuries as well. This time  I told him I’d fallen eight or ten feet in a perfectly normal accident that could have happened to anybody. He didn’t ask why the Queen family did not hire professionals to clean their gutters for them. He is not our doctor on account of his burning curiosity about our personal lives.

No way does he believe my bullshit. He spent years at a VA hospital in DC, where he worked with Special Forces, and he has mentioned wryly that my X-rays and injury pattern look extremely familiar.

Thank God for HIPAA.

“From your description, it was a grade two,” he says, scrolling through his notes. “We’ve discussed how dangerous these are, cumulatively.”

“At length,” I say, attempting to head him off.

He is undeterred. “Keep this up, and worst case scenario, you’re looking at early onset dementia. Are you familiar with the symptoms?”

I watch ESPN, same as anybody. I hear about it when a retired NFL player goes nuts on a cop at a traffic stop and uses chronic traumatic encephalopathy as a defense. “Yes, I’m - ”

“You lose words,” he cuts me off. “Then places and names. You lose basic motor function. Eventually you lose the ability to speak or even make facial expressions, and you’re bed-bound dependent on round-the-clock care.”

“I’m aware. Can you take a - ”

“Before their bodies go,” he says insistently, “some patients experience drastic personality changes.” He folds his hands in his lap and stares me down.  “They become volatile, even aggressive towards loved ones they no longer recognize. Imagine how that plays out with a man of your size, strength, and skill set.”

I spend most of my time with someone two-thirds my weight. “That would be pretty ugly.” I nod down at my knee. “Can you take a look at this too?”

He holds my gaze for one more second, and then he complies.

“Two weeks,” is his verdict. “You’re going to stay off it. No running, no martial arts, definitely no jumping off of anything high. And you’re going to see the physical therapist three times a week.”

“Two weeks?” That’s a long time to be out of commission, if that drive turns out to have anything useful on it.

“Yes, you lucked out,” he says pointedly. “Only two weeks.”

Fine. This is a fairly normal part of my life now - injury and recovery, injury and recovery. I learned years ago that there is nothing heroic about stubbornness in the face of medical professionals. I can do what they say, or I can hurt myself worse.

Besides, I’m not completely useless just because I’m not in the field. Seventy to eighty percent of Team Arrow’s work happens at desks, with coffee and scrunched foreheads, staring at blueprints or financial statements or police reports.

“Only two weeks?” Mom says when I poke my head into her office an hour later. Tish stands in front of her desk with an open holo, and they are rearranging schedules. “That’ll free you up to help us sort through what we found the other night.”

“Goody.”

I’m the last one down to the lair that evening, and the moment the elevator doors close behind me, Mom says, “Hey, so, we should talk about what happened.”

“I have a headache and a busted knee.” See, I’m limping right now. “I don’t need an I told you so.”

Tish sits on the weight bench, ankles crossed and skirt spread out, and she swings her feet disarmingly. “We should still talk about it.”

“You told me we weren’t equipped for it, and I went in anyway,” I concede to Mom. “I was playing injured, ran into some trouble, nearly got myself killed. It was stupid and careless. Won’t happen again.”

Mom leans against her console, arms folded in front of her, one hand playing with her lapel. “My concern is that you needed backup, and you didn’t have it.”

“We’ve been through this. I can’t call in McGinnis for every little thing. Especially not right now.”

“I’m not talking about Terry.”

For the hundredth time: “Then who else?”

It’s not like we can post an ad on Craigslist. For decades this has been a family business, and now I’m the only one left with the requisite skill set and functioning joints - present knee brace excepted. Since Uncle Roy died there hasn’t been anyone else who might take his place.

“Ramirez,” Mom says. “Jones.”

“Neither has a background in hand-to-hand.”

“They don’t have to dress up in leather and beat people up right next to you,” Mom says, spreading her hands in exasperation. “But you need a ripcord. Some cavalry to ride to the rescue.”

She’s not wrong. I could’ve died Friday night over the accumulation of a miscalculation here, an accident there, and a few square inches of crumbling concrete. It was dumb luck that Emanuel happened to be passing by, and even dumber luck that he risked his neck to help me. I could just as easily be red paste on the asphalt.

Abby once told me that it wasn’t just myself I was risking out there. It’s our whole family, every single time.

I glance at Tish. She’s been helping me risk my neck, but there is no pretending she doesn’t prefer me uninjured and home more often. There will come a day when she needs me to put down the bow. Somebody should be waiting in the wings when that day comes.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “It’s something to think about.”

Mom bites her lip, and after a moment’s hesitation, she blurts out something she has clearly been wanting to say for a while now. “Honestly, I need help here too. I was thinking we could bring Sam in.”

“What?”

“Sam Natale.” She gestures around the lair. “Here.”

It’s past time we found someone to pinch hit for Mom. Max does her best, but she’s 2,500 miles away, and she doesn’t know Starling. Sam is by far the most technically proficient information security expert we’ve come across, and I like the guy. I really do. “I’m just seeing one small hitch in that plan.”

Mom purses her lips. “The one where fifty percent of Watchtower’s job is comms, and he can’t hear?”

“It seems like a big deal.”

“There are workarounds for that,” Tish says. “He does just fine upstairs, and he wouldn’t be alone down here.”

“Here’s the thing,” Mom says, spreading her hands. “Most of my advantage is knowing this business so well, but I’m not at the bleeding edge of technology anymore. I haven’t kept up with innovations in quantum computing, and honestly it’s a whippersnapper’s game.” She sinks into her chair and gives it a slow, sad spin. “I’m getting old and slow and set in my ways.”

I don’t like the direction this conversation is taking. “We’ll mount your glassbook on a walker.”

She tips her head back on her neck. “And I’m going to be sixty.”

That math doesn't add up. “Not for three years, you aren’t.”

“But it’s there," she says, gesturing up at the exposed ductwork overhead. "It’s waiting for me.”

“Yeah, okay, and I’ll be thirty.”

“Oh, God, don’t say that,” Mom says on a groan. She turns to Tish. “I was dropping him off at kindergarten yesterday. He was clinging to my leg and bawling his eyes out, and he snotted all over Hobbes.”

“I don’t think that ever happened,” I tell Tish.

Mom’s fond smile fades, and for a moment she looks her age. “ Look, honey, I can’t do this forever .”

None of us can. Six years in, it is past time to start planning for that.

Tish gets to her feet and she gives my hand a quick squeeze on her way over to the workstation. “Why don’t we dig into the files you stole from Magiras Line?”

There follows coffee. Then scrunched foreheads. There is all kinds of staring at purchase orders and bank statements.

“Ship’s logs, fueling invoices, customs,” Mom reads. “Customs, customs, ship’s logs…”

“The word lube features much more heavily than I was expecting,” Tish mutters to me.

“You can hide a lot of needles in a haystack this big,” Mom says. “I’ve automated as much searching as possible, but AIs aren’t great at spotting weirdness holistically. Jon, honey, would you pull up the financial statements for that construction subsidiary? I want to know - ”

“The disbursements variance on their demolitions operations?”

She blinks at me. “That.”

“Sixty-seven percent increase. They’re pouring money into this line of business.”

“Interesting.”

Yes, anything involving Semtex is interesting. Unfortunately none of this is conclusive. I glance at the time. “This is how we’re spending tomorrow night. Isn’t it?”

Mom salutes me with her mug. “And the next night. And the one after, I’m betting.”

As always, Arrowing remains glamorous and sexy.

 

Even injured, I can hood up to pay a visit to a longtime ally. Maggie Spenser’s home is a single story, which means an easy stroll through her deadbolt to her modest little home office.

She  nearly jumps out of her skin when I say, “Good evening, ma’am.”

“Don’t  _ do _ that,” she says, one hand over her heart and the other clutching the handle of her desk drawer, where I know she keeps a Browning Hi-Power.

“I’m here about your girl, Noelle Hunt. The one who got caught in the Glades.”

“She’s fired,” Maggie says tartly, “but otherwise fine. Got to keep my peace with the Three Sixteen.”

Maggie is the leader of the local Red Umbrella Society and owner-operator of Finest Companions, a service linking generous men with fascinating women for scintillating conversation. A couple years ago, she had a little Bratva problem.

Chief Hall can’t dig too deeply into Maggie’s business, or else she’ll hit bedrock on her  _ business _ . Then she’s obligated to do a bunch of unpleasant things, like force Maggie and her employees into rehabilitation and jail any clients whose names she stumbles upon. Trying to help her will, at best, destroy her livelihood.

So when organized crime attempted to extort protection money from her, Hall punted it to me.

The night I met Maggie on a rooftop, she greeted me with a brown paper bag and said, “You know, I’ve liked you since the Archangel case.”

That gave me pause. One of the victims had been a client of hers. That was why Ilinca Nicolescu killed him.

“I saw Jordan Belfort not long before he died,” Maggie went on. “He was funny, and he tipped well.”

“He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

“That man needed a therapist, not a working girl.” When my head tilted curiously, she explained, “You’d be surprised how many just want somebody to listen for a while. They tell us the weirdest shit sometimes. Anyway, I’m glad you got the bitch.” She held out the bag. “You like Snickerdoodles?”

Tonight I gesture her hand away from her desk drawer and say, “I liked it better when you greeted me with cookies.”

“Well, I still like you just the same,” she says, sitting back with a coy smile. “You want something sweet?”

I chuckle, which always sounds strange through the voice changer. “Can the Red Umbrella look after Noelle, in case of reprisals?”

“We are,” she assures me. “At least until she can leave town.”

“That might be best. If they give her any trouble, you call me.” I hold out my phone to transfer the contact to her.

“I already have your number.”

“It changes frequently, for reasons I hope are obvious.”

“Ah. Of course.” She taps her phone to mine. “Thank you for coming by. I’d say feel free to knock next time, but we’ve all got our images to maintain.”

When I make it back to the lair, Dad is there for a rare appearance. He’s sharpening grappling hooks, as he sometimes does in his grumpy moods.

“What’s wrong?”

He looks up, considers telling me, and then goes back to the whirring bench grinder. “Mom went home for the night,” is all he says. “Headache.”

After I’ve showered and changed, I work alongside him for a while.

“Hey, so.” I clear my throat. “Question.”

Dad hardly glances up from the grinder. “What’s that?”

I’ve been affixing a tracker to an arrowhead, and I keep my eyes on it when I say, “How’d you know it was time to ask Mom to marry you?”

That gets his attention. He gives me a long, thoughtful look, and then he sets aside the hook, shuts off the grinder, and goes to the cabinet next to the glass case where his old suit stands. “It wasn’t a single decision,” he says, pulling out a bottle and a couple of glasses. “It was something we discussed over the course of a few months.”

“But you did formally propose.” He is a big, drippy romantic who writes his wife anniversary and Valentine’s letters that reliably make her cry. He absolutely composed a speech.

He smiles, setting the bottle down in front of me. “I wouldn’t call it formal.”

The Havana Club is coming out, so the sharp things and power tools are going away. I clear the table while he wipes the dusty glasses off on his shirt tail. “So it was, ‘Pass the garlic bread, here’s a ring.’”

“I didn’t have a ring to give her,” he says, setting down one glass and starting the other. “I wasn’t planning to ask her until after...”

I dredge up whatever I can remember of the timeline on their various personal milestones and near-death experiences. He might mean after he took back QC and got his personal finances in order. Or he might mean after Ra’s al Ghul and several dozen Assassins took their best shot at leveling the city and torture-executing him and everyone he loved.

“After things had blown over,” is what he settles on. I guess it must have been the Assassins and the torture and stuff. He pours us each two fingers, and he sits back and gestures to me to take a sip. “I didn’t want to make any promises I couldn’t keep, in the event that things didn’t go our way that spring.”

The rum goes down smooth. “What made you change your mind?”

Dad smiles into his glass. “ She said, ‘Where thou goest.’”

That doesn’t make any sense. Mom doesn’t even talk like that. “She said what?”

“We were about to make a spirited attempt at getting the whole team killed,” he says, still not looking at me. “I could feel her hands shaking, and I told her she could wait in the van. She looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘Where thou goest.’”

“What is that from?”

“There’s a passage in Ruth.” For the first time, he sounds uncomfortable, like I’m intruding on something that belongs only to him and Mom. “‘Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee, for where thou goest will I go, where thou lodgest will I lodge. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.’”

What do you even say to that kind of epic declaration? I have no idea, so what comes out of my mouth, after a moment of stunned silence, is simply: “Shit.”

“Yes.” Dad gives me a tolerant smile. “Shit.”

“So, right there, on the spot, you got down on one knee?”

“First we rigged an ARGUS storage facility to explode,” he says, and sips his drink. “Then I took her home, and I got down on one knee.”

With the most casual possible curiosity, I say, “And said what?”

Too casual. Dad gives me a sidelong look and a glib shrug, “It was thirty years ago.”

“You don’t remember?”

He props his elbows on the table, leans toward me, and there’s that knowing grin again. “I’m not going to write the speech for you, Jon.”

No, don’t start having fun at my expense yet. Nobody’s writing any speeches. “I’m just asking what you said.”

His expression softens. “I said, ‘Let’s get married.’”

“And that worked for you?” I sit back and cross my arms. “That’s not even a question.”

“It’s not Jeopardy. It’s a marriage proposal.”

I sip my rum, and he sips his, and for the first time the silence is uncomfortable.

He already knows what I’m asking. I might as well come out with it. “You think we’re too young?”

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter what I think.”

Yes, it does. He’s been married to the smartest woman in the world for nearly thirty years, and she still makes googly eyes at him and vocally appreciates him in leather pants. By all accounts, his mother-in-law practically worshipped him. This grumpy bastard is the reigning champ at wedded bliss, and I want to know what he thinks.

Dad sets his drink down purposefully. “I think you’ve both done more growing up in the last few years than some people manage in a lifetime. And you seem pretty sure about each other.”

When I picture my life ten or fifteen years from now, I see Tish walking towards me with a squirmy kid in her arms and maybe one clinging to her leg. She calls me her magnetic north.

“Yeah, that part is - yeah.” I clear my throat. “I’m sure it’s her. The timing, I’m less sure about.”

“It’s pretty simple, when you get down to it. If you want to be married, then get married.”

It is not that fucking simple, as he of all people should know. “What if I die on her? What if I get hurt, and she’s stuck babysitting me for the rest of my life?”

He shakes his head. “Those are questions you answered when you first got involved with her.”

“What if we have kids, and  _ then _ I die on her?”

He does not like that question one bit. He takes a deep breath before he says, “That is a whole other set of decisions. But you already know that in the event that anything happened to you, she would have all the help she needed. If that’s really what’s holding you back, then you should have cut her loose a long time ago.”

Silence.

Dad just waits.

“It’s not the only thing.”

He waits some more.

“She’s only ever known me as the Arrow. For five years, there’s been no room for error. I haven’t fucked up because I can't afford to.”

Dad looks at me like I’m crazy. “You think you haven’t fucked up in the past five years?”

“Like,  _ big _ fuck-ups. The kind where she leaves me for an accountant with a nice King Charles spaniel.” Who would I even be if I quit? Powerpoint Ranger, bored in the evenings, probably. Go chasing some high to match jumping off rooftops, just like that  nineteen-year-old who whined to be let into the secret clubhouse.

That kid thought he knew something about danger because he’d flipped a car, and he thought he knew something about edgy because he’d gotten arrested a couple of times and promptly bailed out. He wasn’t malicious. He was just born on third base and thought he’d hit a triple.

Tish Cuvier would not have looked twice at him.

“Point is, I won’t be the Arrow forever.”

Dad takes his time answering me. He polishes off the rum and pours himself another glass. Then he glances over at his leathers in their glass case. “In some ways, you will.”

“Maybe we’re in a good place, and I should just enjoy it. There’s no hurry, right?”

He takes a long, thoughtful pause. Finally he gestures at me with his glass. “Not long after your mother told me she was pregnant with you, Bruce Wayne asked for our help.”

Sounds like a non sequitur, but let’s go with it.  “That doesn’t sound like him.”

Dad amends, “It was Dick Grayson who did the asking. For a couple of years, he had been the unofficial ambassador between the two teams. He was good at it - being the glue. People took to him.”

He certainly seemed popular. Aunt Thea’s exact words were, “The only flaw that boy had was that he insisted on wearing clothes.”

“Except Uncle Roy?” I guess.

“There was no real jealousy there,” Dad says with a half-smile. “The flirting wasn’t something Dick could turn off. No matter who he was talking to, he was trying to win them over. When he asked for our help, your mother told him yes before he had even specified the target. How much do you know about the gun runner who went by Black Mask?”

“That he was a gun runner and he went by Black Mask.”

“Both of our teams had handled men like him before. We took him seriously, given the sheer firepower at his disposal, but we believed we had his measure.”

Sudden certainty comes over me: Dad is about to tell me the story of how Dick Grayson died. “He saw you coming?”

“He knew our names. Polymath he might be, but Bruce was not primarily an information security expert. Black Mask followed him home, so to speak - found a backdoor into his system - and among other things he found detailed plans to dismantle Team Arrow, if we ever became a threat.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Dad shrugs, not terribly bothered. “Bruce failed to mention that his security had been breached.”

Un-fucking-forgivable. “Did he  _ forget _ ?”

“He had his reasons.”

Whatever they were, thirty years of silent treatment seems downright lenient.

“He warned us against moving on Black Mask, but we believed we had better intel. A shipment was going out that night, and Dick was adamant that we stop it. And of course, a small army was waiting.”

I want the details. Where did this go down, and how were you armed? How did you spot the trap, and did your exfiltration plan account for it? But it’s hard enough for Dad to talk about without me grilling him on tactics. My questions won’t sound like anything but criticism.

“He had also sent someone after your mother,” Dad says quietly. “And you, though he couldn’t have known that.”

I see. This is also the story of how the Black Mask died.

“You know how quickly things can change in the field. It took less than sixty seconds to go from a dangerous but straightforward mission to fighting for our lives. Nightwing was one of the best I’ve ever seen, but he wasn’t bulletproof.”

“He didn’t make it out?”

“No, he didn’t. Shot in the back, fell two stories.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Had we listened to Bruce, it wouldn’t have happened. Had he told us what he knew, it wouldn’t have happened. Black Mask was a fairly conventional threat, and it shouldn’t have gone that way. ” Pause. “Dick was about a month shy of twenty-eight.”

So this is why Dad and Bruce Wayne, who had more in common than most best friends or even brothers, didn’t speak to each other for decades. They each had too much reason to blame themselves. They both had too much reason to blame each other.

Incidentally, I’m about two months shy of twenty-eight.

“What happened to Black Mask?”

“He knew our names,” Dad repeats, very slowly. “He sent an assassin after your mother.”

Three arrows at center mass, then. “I can’t imagine the old man was okay with that.”

“We never discussed it,” Dad says, because they did not discuss anything at all for the next twenty years. “But no, I imagine he wasn’t.”

I’ve been pretty patient with this digression so far, but there is supposed to be a point somewhere at the end of it. “I'm not sure what you’re getting at.”

Nor is he. He makes a frustrated gesture. “Dick would be fifty-four now. With a bad back and bad knees, like the rest of us.”

Not getting any clearer. “So - die young, leave a hot-ass corpse?”

He shakes his head. “He and Barbara Gordon were close. They were kids together. I guess you could call them high school sweethearts.”

“I hear he was close to everything female between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five.”

Dad shrugs. “The way it looked to me was that, in his head, there were only two women in the world. Barbara, and everybody else. But the timing was never right, the work was always in the way. I don’t advise asking Commissioner Gordon about him, but Thea can probably tell you all the reasons why they were never ready.”

This life will always call for sacrifice, and the stars will never align. Angels will not unfurl a banner over Tish’s head that says,  _ Act now! Limited time only! _

“You want to be Tish’s husband?” Dad says, looking me full in the face. “Is that who you want to be?”

Shit, that sounds unsettling. Tish’s husband. Which would make her my wife. Because that is, in fact, the point of marriage.

“Don’t pass on something that feels right to you because of the circumstances. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Well, you said it like a drunk, twisty motherfucker.” And after just two fingers of rum.

“I take a lot of meds that don’t mix well with alcohol.”

My hand tightens around my glass. “What do you mean, a lot of meds?”

He pauses just a beat too long, and then he lies to me. “It’s just a painkiller. My knees aren’t what they used to be.” To shut me up, h e closes his eyes and tips his head back. “How about you drive me home?”

  
  


The next day, I give McGinnis a call, because we have commiserated for years about never getting the full story on Grayson.

He doesn’t pick up. For three days.

For the first time, I send Abby to check on him instead of the other way around.

“Ace hasn’t killed and eaten him,” she reports back dutifully. “He seems pretty okay. He says he’s been really busy with all the details of settling the estate.”

No, he hasn’t. There is a battalion of lawyers for that. “Thanks, junebug.”

The very next day, he finally calls me back.

“Wow. You’re alive. Great to hear from you.”

He sighs. “Can you please keep your sister out of this?”

“Answer your phone, and I’ll be happy to.”

“I’ve been a little busy. The other night somebody tried to steal equipment from Wayne Enterprises’ biotech division. Max and I are still trying to sort out why.”

“You think it’s more complicated than just profiting on the black market?”

“Don’t know yet,” he says gruffly. “That’s why I’m busy.”

“My knee is still shit, but if you need a fresh set of eyes or an extra hand working mission control, I can fly out.”

“I know.” He mutters a brief and nearly inaudible, “Thanks,” and then he hangs up.

I didn’t get to give him the story on Grayson. If he’s going to be this difficult, maybe he doesn’t deserve it anyway.

  
  


The second week in September, Aunt Thea hosts her annual Couture for the Cure fundraiser. For the first time since I nearly got stabbed at that event three years ago, I am available to attend.

“May I have first shower, so I can dry my hair?” Tish says as the elevator doors open onto my apartment. “Your parents are picking us up at eight.”

“This is weird, huh? Going on a double date with my parents.”

“We go on a lot of double dates with your parents,” she says, unconcerned.

“What? No, we don’t.”

She gives me a look, and she lets me think about it.

Dinner at home doesn’t count, but dinner at Vincent’s probably does. And lunch at Sukho Thai, and drinks at Cure, and wine at Delachaise...  “Shit.”

Ten minutes before eight, Tish emerges from the bathroom, fully made up and holding her dark green dress up with an arm across her chest. “Can you zip me?”

I’ve seen her in formalwear before, but it never gets old. Zipped and tugged into place, the dress looks like Old Hollywood - improbable hourglass and all. “I like this dress. This is a good dress.”

She gives me a broad, earnest smile that does not belong on someone so sultry, and she leans over to rearrange my hair. “You’re looking pretty sharp too.”

When my parents arrive, Mom is less impressed with me. “Jonathan, where is your bowtie?”

I turn on my heel to go fetch it. “I left it upstairs.”

“It’s right here,” Tish says, and pulls it from her purse. “I hope someone else knows how to tie it.”

Dad bends his head to peer at me from the passenger seat, and when it becomes clear that someone is not me, he sighs. “I’ll do it when we get there.”

Which is how I end up standing in the parking lot of the Starling Museum of Art, tipping my chin up like a little kid while Dad ties my clothing on. “It’s been a long time,” I say in my own defense. “How am I supposed to remember something that I only do once or twice a year?”

He frowns at my throat in concentration, adjusting the silk. “You find a demonstration on YouTube, like the rest of us.”

Aunt Thea has chosen a beautiful venue this year. Every piece in the sculpture garden is lit up dramatically, and the lights of the marble halls have been tuned to a golden, candlelight glow.

We hardly make it ten steps into an exhibit full of blown glass sea creatures before Aunt Thea comes to greet us. She is accompanied by a silver-haired man with impeccable posture. “Ollie, you made it!” She turns to her date, who is already offering his hand to Dad. “You remember Carter, don’t you?

Dad’s eyebrows rise faintly, but he accepts the handshake. “Carter Bowen?”

This Bowen guy says pleasant hellos to all of us, and he seems completely unaware that Mom is holding her breath and Dad is wearing the extra-attentive expression he puts on when he’s trying hard not to laugh.

Whatever the joke is, Aunt Thea bears it with good grace until she can send Bowen off to fetch her a glass of champagne.

“What is it like?” Mom says as soon as he is gone, leaning in with sparkling eyes. “Being with a man who healed the nation’s deep political rifts _ and _ cured cancer?”

“Has he told you he’s publishing his second autobiography?” Dad says. “Advance orders are sold out.”

“He’s wonderful.” Aunt Thea crosses her arms. “He’s perfect. It’s like I ordered him from a catalog.”

Dad’s amusement turns fond. “Mom would be very proud.”

She puts a hand on his shoulder, and he obediently bends down so she can peck him on the cheek. “I have to go say hello to some of our charter members,” she says, “but I am very glad you’re all here. Tish, that Rene Ruiz is gorgeous.” And she’s off to make nice with the money.

“Something to drink?” Dad asks Mom and Tish, and gets two orders for champagne. “I’ll be right back.”

“And a glass of red for me, thanks so much for asking,” I call after him.

When he disappears to the bar, I turn to Mom. “Who the hell is Carter Bowen?”

She grins, taking a seat at a white-draped table with a flickering candle nestled in the centerpiece. “Oh, just the neurosurgeon your father could never measure up to at the high school reunions.”

I am momentarily floored by the idea that Dad ever had a sense of inferiority to anyone. I forget, most of the time, that he has not always been the man I know, steady and accomplished, secure in his purpose in life. When he was my age, absolutely no one was trying to live up to him.

It’s a nice night, getting pleasantly tipsy with Mom and Dad and Tish. A nice double date with my parents.

Until Julian fucking Kord shows up.

He greets us like old family friends, which I guess we are, when he’s not publicly calling my father “complicit in the first great moral crime of the twenty-first century.”

“Jon, good to see you,” he says with a handshake that seems genuinely warm.

“You too,” I say, because I have to. “And you’ve met my girlfriend, Tish.”

His eyes widen when he recognizes her, and I can see the moment the word girlfriend clicks. “Oh, of course. I, ah, I didn’t realize.” It’s the first time I’ve seen him falter, and it makes me believe him. “Nice to see you.”

For my parents, he is all polished politeness once again. “I’ve been pretty strongly critical of your administration,” he says, shaking my Dad’s hand. “I hope you know you still have my utmost personal respect.”

Dad has smiled in the faces of men who were actively plotting his murder. He smiles back. 

Then Kord pulls out a chair, and he actually sits down with us.

God damn it.

At first, he is pleasant enough, telling us about how he met the Diggles in Khartoum at some big party at the American embassy. “The expat community over there is tiny,” he says. “We all run into each other eventually. Lyla was telling me they were expecting a grandchild?”

Eventually he gets to the point. His organization is looking for funding to open a free clinic in the St. Stephen corridor, “and we’d like to partner with the city on this one.”

Taking it straight to the mayor, whom you have badmouthed all over the Internet? That’s ballsy.

Dad gives him a dignified, mayoral non-answer that leaves the door open for further negotiation, and then he excuses himself on the grounds that, “I promised my wife a dance.”

Sure, that sounds likely. 

Julian takes his dismissal for what it is. Mom practically drags Dad to the floor, because no way is she letting him out of it now that he has  _ promised _ .

“One song,” he mutters to her as they head for the floor. “You get one, and that’s under duress.”

“But what if they play ‘Uptown Funk?’ You won’t make me leave during ‘Uptown Funk.’”

Mom teases him all the way to the parquet square, and Tish watches them go, letting her head tip sideways onto her hand. A dark curl falls onto her neck, and I’d like to put it back for her. “They’re really sweet, you know that?”

They’re my parents. I’ve walked in on them making out. I roll my eyes and say, “Adorable.”

“It’s what I want my marriage to look like, thirty years in.”

I don’t love the way she phrased that, like I’m not part of that picture. “We’re going to look much better.” I nod toward Dad’s awkward bendy-sway as he lets Mom back-lead. “I mean, come on. What the hell is that?”

Tish makes big, overbright eyes at me. Then she does something she rarely does in public, and kisses me full on the mouth.

“You want to dance?” I say when the band eases into “Unforgettable.”

“Your knee,” she objects. It’s true that dancing is on the list of things I’m not currently allowed to do.

“A slow song can’t hurt,” I say, and I am mostly right.

Mom pulls Tish into the next dance, and Dad and I retreat to the candlelit table, where Aunt Thea comes to find us soon after.

“You’ve lost Carter,” Dad says, conspicuously scanning the room.

“That’s the curse of my accomplishments. Men get intimidated.” Her grin looks a little tipsy as she takes the seat next to him. “He’s sneaking a cigarette. Don’t tell anyone the doctor smokes.”

“Finally, a flaw.” Dad steadies her on the way down. For some reason connected to her regenerated nerves, when my aunt is drunk or sleep-deprived, she loses physical coordination faster than most people. When Dad is sure she won’t miss the chair, his voice lowers and softens. “I’m glad you’re getting out there again. You look like you’re having a nice time.”

“It’s been all right.” She gives Dad a half-smile, and then she looks away from him and adds, almost defensively, “It’s low pressure, you know? It’s not like I’m looking for his replacement.”

She doesn’t have to say whose. Even more quietly, Dad says, “Of course not.”

One less drink, and she probably wouldn’t be telling us: “That kind of thing doesn’t happen twice.”

The lines in Dad’s forehead deepen, and he gives her a look of total sincerity. Not your regular unleaded sincerity. I mean the high octane, searing genuineness that only Dad can manage. The look that makes Abby relax around him, strangers vote for him, and me willing to follow him into a hail of bullets.

I bet it made Uncle Roy pick up a bow.

Dad waits until Aunt Thea meets his eyes before he says, “I know.”

I do not belong at this table right now. Time to visit the bar.

On my way back with two glasses of wine, I catch sight of Tish trying earnestly to teach my mother a lindy swing-out. There was a previous attempt at Elaine’s wedding, but I guess it didn’t take. Mom keeps getting stuck on the triple-step, and, every time, she dissolves into giggles and pats Tish’s cheek.

“Is that for me?” Aunt Thea says, reaching for the extra glass.

Well, now it is. I’ll get Tish another one later.

“I’m kind of a maudlin drunk,” she says wryly. “But you can deal.”

“You never say his name,” I blurt out before I can stop myself. Suddenly I’m very aware of Dad’s eyes on me. When her expression freezes, I try to soften it. “Not that you have to. I mean, I can’t tell you how to grieve.”

“I guess you’re right,” she says, with a shrug of her thin shoulders. “I don’t.”

“I’m sorry.” For what, I’m not sure. I’m just generally sorry.

She smiles and pats my hand where it rests on the table. “Don’t worry about it.” She screws on a smile, and she turns her attention to the band, who have just downshifted into some Van Morrison. “It’s another slow one. Go save Tish from your mom.”

They have already disappeared from the dance floor. I go hunting through the modern art wing.

On the way past the blown glass sea creatures, I cross paths with a server in a black waistcoat and bowtie, and I suppress a double take. The face is burned into my memory, though it was blurrier and way more freaked out the last time I saw it.

It’s Emanuel, who saved my life in the Glades two weeks ago. He glances at me, nervously glances away, and picks up his pace. He disappears toward the kitchen.

Alarm bells sound in my brain, and I turn down the volume on them. There are perfectly reasonable explanations for his presence here and his skittishness. Cornell Hunt is up-and-coming in the service industry, and it’s not unlikely he found a catering job for his mentee. The kid could be awkward because it’s his first time in black tie.

Still, I don’t like it.

I find Mom, but Tish isn’t with her. She’s not in the Impressionist wing or the sculpture garden, and the bartenders haven’t seen her.

I’m a breath away from crisis mode when I finally spot her. She is trapped at a table with Julian fucking Kord, which does not look good from any angle.

“No one is advocating that now,” Julian is saying. “Not out loud they aren’t. But that’s where this road leads.”

Tish drops her eyes and turns her head just slightly. A stranger could mistake her expression for pensive. In fact, she is too angry to speak.

I clear my throat. “I think I walked into this at the wrong time.”

Julian gestures me into the chair. “Sorry, we were getting into an ethical question.” From which he refuses to be derailed. “Are you familiar with the history of Unit 731 during the Second World War?”

This is about Tish’s father. Julian cornered her at a party to harass her about her father. I’m still geared up for a fight, and it has never been so tempting to throw him out of his chair and start kicking.

He is a client, and I cannot bruise him. Moreover, what he just said departs from the usual boilerplate. When Dr. Cuvier’s crimes came to light, everyone’s favorite comparison was Mengele. Nobody ever thought to mention the Ishii Network, so - points for originality. “I’m no expert, but yeah.”

“Do you know anything about what happened to the perpetrators after the war?”

“Nothing.”

He clears his throat. “Well, most of them were - ”

“Nothing happened to them. The US Army gave them immunity in exchange for their data, then turned around and used it for their own bioweapons program.”

Tish startles a bit.

“This is what I mean when I say the precedent is dangerous,” Julian continues, now that he’s got me up to speed. “We have to send a message. If this is how the data was gathered, then we have to drag its value down to zero. It’s a fruit of the poisonous tree kind of thing. No one  _ profits _ from this.”

“Should I have refused the regenerative treatment,” Tish says, “and died slowly of renal failure?”

“Of course not,” he says, all sincerity. “I’m not calling for individual sacrifice. It’s collective action we need.”

I lean in, cast a meaningful look at Tish, and advise him, “Then maybe find another individual to help you send your message.”

He addresses her instead of me. “I understand this is a big ask. But your voice on this issue would speak louder than anyone else’s.”

“So loud, you’d think someone would hear her when she said no.”

Finally, anger flashes across his face at this presumptuous interruption. “You do realize there are people in the movement who are even more suspicious of genmod, precisely because your family has pushed it so hard.”

“Right, because we’re in the inner ring of the Illuminati. The whole New World Order thing is going well, by the way.”

“The name Queen means something in Starling,” he insists. “Even if it’s stamped on a few donated libraries or hospital wings, you can’t buy morality offsets like carbon credits.”

“My father polls better than the last five mayors we’ve had.”

“With good reason,” Julian says unreservedly. “Even if I disagree with him on policy, there’s no denying he’s devoted his life to this city. But there are a hundred and fifty years of history attached to his name.”

My great-grandparents, several greats back, were indeed the careless elite who smashed up things and creatures, and who then closed ranks behind a shield wall of vast arrogance. The value of a statistical life was what they might spend on a third home at a whim. My grandparents were no better. At their best, they suffered for their principles and died for their children, but their best was a few hours in a lifetime of self-serving dishonesty.

Dad was the first to escape that legacy. The first to use the word “honor” and mean it.

“Look around.” Julian gestures around the party. Light refracts through the glass sea creatures and plays over formalwear and smiles. “They’re all here to do good, and to be seen doing it. Most of them even mean well. They’re all following your family’s lead, you know. This whole project rests on your name.”

“Your dinner jacket is beautifully tailored,” Tish observes, looking him up and down. “It’s a good investment, isn’t it, when you attend enough of these things?”

He smiles. “Yes, all right, I’m another one-percenter in black tie. But I’m here because these are the people I need to convince. They’re the ones with the power to change things.”

“And I’m sure they’ll jump at the chance to do exactly as you say,” I snap, getting to my feet. “Good night.”

Tish steps into the arm I hold out for her, and we leave him alone at the table.

“You all right?” I mutter to her after we have attained a safe distance.

She is still pale with bottled rage. “I think this might be an excellent time for another glass of wine.”

I deposit her at my parents’ table and leave her to explain the thundercloud over her head. I go to fetch her another glass. On the way, I compose a beautiful drink order for myself too - one with the word “double” in bold and all caps. It’s a very attractive idea, but I only flirt with it and move on. No one needs me losing my drunk temper in public.

The server manning the bar is Emanuel.

He looks as nervous as before, and he greets me with an awkward nod and a strange little rock back and forth on the balls of his feet.

Jon Queen has never been introduced to this kid before. All I say is, “Two glasses of red, and a generous pour on one of them.”

He has to open a new bottle, and he fumbles it. I pretend not to notice.

Just before he slides the glasses toward me, he says, “Hey, sorry to bother you and all, but, um.” He clears his throat. “You’re the Arrow, right?”

I’ve had this nightmare. Just being asked, point-blank by a near-stranger, about the single most dangerous secret I have. Stunned silence is really all I’ve got.

“Oh, shit, maybe not.” He frowns at me. “Or maybe so. That face could mean a lot of things. If I were the Arrow, and somebody asked me that, I’d probably look like that too.”

I’m still utterly unprepared for this conversation. Maybe he’ll take my dumbass expression for innocence.

“Could you maybe say something? Because I’m out on a limb here, asking you this.”

Laughter is probably the appropriate reaction, right? I hope to God it doesn’t sound nervous. “Why the hell would you think I’m the Arrow?”

“Last time I saw him, he had a bum knee, and tonight you’re taking it easy on that same leg.” Before I can go on the offensive with a barrage of questions, he adds, “But mostly because of your girl. She works with the Arrow, and he calls her baby. You seemed like a good place to start.” There is a long, awkward pause, and then he offers up, “But if you’re not him, then - I hate to tell you this, but I think maybe your girl is fucking around on you with the Arrow.”

If I just keep repeating his own words back to him in a stupid voice, maybe he’ll start to feel equally stupid. “Tish is working with the Arrow. And he calls her baby.”

“Yeah, that’s what I saw.” He adds, speaking a little too fast, “And I mean, if your girl’s got a back door man, him being the Arrow is basically a compliment, right? That’s your competition, at least you know what league you’re in.”

“Saw how? What the hell happened?”

“You don’t know me from a stack of shit, so I’m thinking you won’t believe me. Maybe you should ask her about it.”

“Why…” My throat works. “Why are you looking for the Arrow?”

He thinks that over for a long time before he answers, watching my expression carefully. “If you’re him, we’ll talk,” he says at last. “If not, it’s kind of not your business.”

This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had while sober with all my clothes on.

“So, that’s a no?” he says tentatively.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

His shoulders round, and he shrinks away from me a few inches. “Look, go easy on her, if you ask her about it. I don’t want to fuck things up for her. She’s a good person and all.”

What is the Emily Post Guide for dealing with someone who tells you your girlfriend is cheating on you with your alter ego? Do I punch him?

“Just, if you are him.” He doesn’t meet my eyes, and he shifts from foot to foot. “I could use your help, is all.”

The moment before he clasps his hands behind his back, I realize they are shaking.

“All right,” he says abruptly. “Shift change. You know where to find me.”

He scoots out from behind the bar like there’s a snake coiled around the gin bottles, and he takes off at his odd, loping gait.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Team Arrow tries to decide what to do about the stranger who may know their identities, trouble keeps popping up left and right. Then it pops up in Gotham.

“So Emanuel says he needs our help,” Mom says, dragging yet another file up out of the conference room drive and flicking it aside impatiently.  “Do we believe that’s all he wants?”

I slump deeper into the chair opposite. “He’s either the most radically honest idiot or the most manipulative little shit alive, so it’s hard to tell. I hope all he wants is the Arrow’s help.” I glance over at Tish, who hasn’t said a word since I came in to tell Mom the story. “What I want to know is how he identified you.”

She drops her eyes. “You called me by name.”

Cold washes over me. “I did what?”

“You had a head injury. I doubt you even knew what you were saying.”

No. Back up before the excuses. “I gave some random Glades kid your name?”

Tish reaches for the file and flicks it open. “He wouldn’t have recognized it, if he didn’t already know me from Bridge House.”

She starts pulling up documents in a focused, businesslike way, already moving on to work the problem. The inside of my head is still just one long, echoing _fuuuuck_.

I gave Tish away, and I didn’t even know that I’d done it. My insides tie themselves in knots and trying their hardest to become my outsides.

“Emanuel Richmond, twenty years old,” Tish reads. “Born to Yvette Richmond at Charity Hospital, lived in the St. Stephen corridor all his life. Went to McMain until he dropped out in his junior year, possibly because of whatever’s in this sealed juvenile file that I can’t get into. He’s on his own now. Mother and younger half-brother live in Coast City, and his father has been in prison for aggravated assault since 2042.”

Mom flips through the documents on offer, and she gives Tish a look somewhere between worried and impressed. “You’ve already looked into him.”

“I wasn’t sure if he heard Jon,” Tish murmurs. “I thought I’d keep an eye on him, just in case.”

Jesus Christ. I need a katana, steady hands, and somebody to stand behind me and cut off my head.

“I’m going to see what’s in that sealed file,” Mom says, crossing her arms.

“Here, look,” says Tish.

Among the names and photos in her file is Cornell Hunt, the sous chef at Antoine’s. She scrolls through other faces I vaguely remember. They were Uncle Roy’s mentees, according to Tish’s notes. Perhaps they were the ones who suffered through a suit and tie to show up at his funeral.

“Emanuel was one of Mr. Harper’s too,” she says, and pulls up a police report. “He and a few of the others were arrested for trespassing four years ago, not long after Mr. Harper died. It’s unclear why the charges didn’t stick.” Tish tugs a corner of the file to zoom in for us. “They said they were trying to solve a murder.”

On the official record, Uncle Roy was shot by an unidentified assailant in a probable mugging gone wrong. To the general public, it was sudden and senseless as a lightning strike. The timeline was strange, the murder scene was off-track from his routine, and the physical evidence made less sense the longer you looked at it. It was just one of those random acts of evil.

His family has known for years that his killer is dead. Everyone whom I believed mattered. But as far as everyone else could see, SCPD never so much as made an arrest in relation to the case.

In his more pretentious mayoral moods, Dad sometimes says that, “Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.”

I guess somebody went looking.

Mom tries on a couple of puzzled, impressed, and sympathetic faces before she finally says, “Why didn’t we hear about this at the time?”

“There was a lot going on,” says Tish, queen of understatement.

I release my death grip on the arms of my chair. “Emanuel’s still a danger to us.”

“He saved your life,” Tish reminds me. “He’s probably not a bad guy.”

“People who probably aren’t bad can kill you.”

“He wants to talk to the Arrow,” says Mom. “Maybe that’s not the worst idea.”

“That will only confirm his suspicions about Tish.”

“Too late to play dumb,” Mom says. “He was right next to you. Even with the mask, if he knows whose face he’s comparing the Arrow to…”

“Yeah.” I put my head in my hands. I rub my temples, smooth my hands back, and clasp them behind my neck. “Fine. We’ll go looking for him tonight.”

“Won’t be hard,” Mom says.

Head still bowed under my steepled forearms, I nod.

There are rustles and the squeak of a chair. A hand ruffles my hair - Mom, on her way out.

When she’s gone, Tish kisses my head and does something I’d never expect at the office: she slides into my lap. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Let’s take you off comms. If I can’t control my stupid mouth when I’m talking to you, then let’s make sure it’s never an issue again.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She tugs at my arms and starts to rearrange them around her waist. “But I am a little worried. If you could please come out of the guilt spiral and hug me, I’d really appreciate it.”

A few minutes later, she leaves the room first, and I follow shortly after.

At the coffeemaker, Ramirez gives me a fond eye-roll. “You know you’re not fooling anyone.”

I answer with a noncommittal hum. If our co-workers think Tish and I are hooking up in the conference room, they’re giving us too much credit for law-abiding professionalism.

Late in the afternoon, Jones calls in. “So I’m at this golf thing with Kord.”

“The charity tournament QI sponsored?” Good. That’s where the schedule puts him.

“We’ve, ah. We’ve got a parking lot full of torched cars here.”

“What the hell?”

Calmly and professionally, he fills me in. Apparently someone shoved burning, gas-soaked rags into the gas caps of a few executives’ vehicles. They went up within a few minutes of each other, and half a million dollars worth of car is still smoldering outside the Golf Club.

“Nobody got hurt,” Jones is quick to assure me. “We noticed in time and cleared the area. Didn’t spot whoever did it, but there must be a camera somewhere around here.”

“It’s Vitruvius,” I say flatly.

“It could be connected to the attempts on Paul’s life,” Mom says, looking doubtful.

“It’s Vitruvius.”

Two hours later, Sam pokes his head in. “It’s Vesu - Viru - Vitru - ” He glances down at his glassbook and frowns at the spelling. “It’s the crazy people who hate science. Here, that’s our guy.”

Mom beams at the photo and dossier on his laptop, and then up at him. “We’ll pass this along to SCPD.”

When Dad gets the file, he makes a very grumpy phone call. “These idiots could have seriously hurt someone. When SCPD finds them, I won’t be able to make an example of them like I should.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“A lot of the attendees were campaign sponsors of mine,” Dad says. “The harder I crack down, the easier it will be for people to say I did it at the behest of my supporters.”

“It’s all right,” says Mom. “We’ve got this.”

So what with one thing and another, the lingering guilt over Tish is far from my mind.

Before we leave for the evening, Mom calls me into her office. I’m probably in trouble for unprofessional use of the conference room. It doesn’t matter that all Tish and I did was sit quietly and do stupid yoga breathing. The appearance of office quickies is bad enough.

“So Dad says you guys talked,” Mom says, gesturing me into a chair.

So I’m not in trouble. I’m not sure I like this better.

“There’s something I want to give you,” she goes on, “but I don’t want it to freak you out.”

I take a seat, hands on the armrests and prepped to flee. “Great lead-in. Now I’m freaked out.”

“It’s not pressure, okay?” she says, digging in a drawer. “I’m just, you know, giving you options.”

“The suspense is only getting worse.”

She puts a little velvet box on her desk and scoots it across to me. Jewelry was about the last thing I expected. I open it, and inside is a modest little diamond on an intricate gold band. “Oh.”

“It was my grandmother’s.” Mom twists her fingers together, fidgeting. “She made it out of Poland with pretty much the clothes on her back and that ring.”

I pull my hand away reflexively.

“No, no.” She scoots to the edge of her chair, hands fluttering encouragement. “Look at it.”

I pull the ring from its silk nest and turn it over in my hand. It is cold and spindly to the touch, and though I know it would look bigger on a small female hand, it still feels too insubstantial for all the symbolism it is supposed to carry.

“I know the diamond isn’t huge, but if you wanted to trade up, there’s a jeweler downtown who’ll take care of it. I thought it might be nice to see it on somebody’s hand again.”

I clear my throat. “Well, it’s never going to fit me.”

She tips her head at me. “Jonathan.”

“This is really, um,” startling. “This is really nice, but I kind of pictured picking something out myself.”

“If that’s what you prefer, of course I don’t mind. It’s just that, on Dad’s side of the family, you’ve got all this  _stuff_ to remember them by. Furniture and art and entire buildings. Sometimes I think Oliver left the ruins of the mansion standing just to have a place to go that was still connected to his family.” She tucks her hair behind her ear, an oddly nervous gesture. “I don’t have as much to offer from mine, but there’s this.”

Tish would love it. A family heirloom? She’d probably burst out crying. “You don’t want to keep it, maybe for Abby?”

“I would not be here, awkwardly shoving it at you, if I wasn’t sure. And I’m not giving it to you to be pushy. Tomorrow, next month, next year- whenever it feels right.” She leans her elbows on her desk. “But it’s been on your mind, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s been on my mind.”

“You know we love her, and she’s already family. We’d be thrilled if you made it official.”

If I didn’t want Mom to know, I should’ve told Dad to keep it to himself. They’re married. They talk about things.

And now I have a ring in a velvet box.

“Thanks, Mom.”

She beams at me. Then, before she can stop herself, she blurts out: “Please don’t wait a year.”

I am officially done talking about this. I have two options: flee her office like a startled hamster or distract her with something sufficiently important. I squeeze the armrests. “Did you find Emanuel?”

She knows what I’m doing. She purses her lips and lets me. “Working an event in the Garden District right now. He takes public transit most of the way home, but you can catch him walking the last few blocks.”

We talk shop long enough that when I retreat, it looks strategic.

When I step out of the elevator into the lair, Tish is already prepping my gear. The little box in my pocket feels heavier than it is. I don’t say much to her as I suit up.

A little under two hours later, on a stretch of crumbling storefronts, I drag Emanuel into an alley. I’m sufficiently annoyed with him that I greet him by stringing him upside down by his ankles from a rusty fire escape.

“I’m told you were looking for me.”

He stops struggling and swings helplessly, wide-eyed but not exactly afraid. “Hi.”

I cross my arms. “Is now a good time?”

He spreads his arms, which makes him swing a little wider. “Great time.”

“You wanted my help with something.”

“Yeah.” Upside down, his expression of deep and genuine concern looks ridiculous. “That girl we helped with the Three Sixteen, Noelle Young? She’s been missing since the day after, and nobody’s looking for her. I think the Black Hand’s got her.”

“The Black Hand,” I repeat. For fuck’s sake. If this dumb bastard scared the shit out of me and made me come out here for _this_ , I may leave him here all night for the garbage men to find. “What,” I say as patiently as possible, “would make you think that?”

“I can’t raise her on any of her - ”

“No, the Hand. Why would you think the Black Hand has her, when they haven’t had a functional operation in Starling for five years?”

“Little shit, you know? Little shit that adds up. I think they’re moving in on the docks again. Cor - um, this guy I know, he’s older, and he remembers when they had their claws in everything at the port. When they got taken down, there were guys from St. Stephen who lost a pretty sweet gig, you know? And those same guys, they’re all back at the port now, moving shit late at night under heavy guard. It’s like the old days, my friend says. Like the Hand, with weird mottos and shit.”

“What weird mottos?”

“Hell if I know. They’re not in English.”

“Then how do you know they’re weird?”

“Because none of those motherfuckers speak anything but English.”

Even if he’s wrong about the Hand, I’m willing to believe _someone_ is moving in on the docks. “What would they want with Noelle?”

“Why’d they want the people they took before?” he says, crossing his arms ominously. It does not have the intended effect, as it sets him to swaying again.

Maggie Spencer told me herself that Noelle is safely away. There is no damsel in need of rescue. Best to nudge him off his white horse. “You know it’s most likely that she left town after that brush with the Three Sixteen.”

His crossed arms tighten against his chest. “She’d have told me.”

I’ve seen that look before. The boy has got it bad, and I suspect that will not end well for him. “Maybe you don’t know her as well as you thought.”

He shakes his head sharply, and with almost religious conviction he says, “She’d have told me.”

I go back over my memories of the night we met; there was no indication they knew each other. “Look, even if something has happened to her, the Three Sixteen are still the prime suspects. This is the kind of thing SCPD would be all over, if you took it to them.”

“Noelle would freak if I did that, and you know it. Hey, can you let me down? I’m getting a headache.”

I get an arm behind his shoulders and lower him to his feet instead of just letting him curl up on the ground, and I work free the larskhead knot around his ankles. He stumbles back against the dirty brick wall, dizzy and wincing. “We’ve got proof. Photos and stuff.”

“Who is we?”

Emanuel shrugs. “There’s a group of us who came through the program at Bridge House. Tenet seven is giving back.”

“How many?”

He lifts his chin. “About a dozen I could call up right now. Another two dozen who show up every now and then.”

“Oh, good,” Tish says in my ear. “Three dozen young men between the ages of fifteen and thirty with a history of violent offenses, all getting together to protect their neighborhood. I see no way this can go wrong.”

A righteous cause might make them something other than a gang, but it might not. Most gangs start as a group of kids who live within walking distance and who decide it’s better to hang together than hang separately.

“Tell you what.” I replace the knife in my pocket, and I take out my phone. “I still consider Noelle Young an open case.” This is an exaggeration at best, but it’s a bridge to the truth: “If someone’s sneaking shit into my city late at night under heavy guard, I want to know why. Send everything you’ve got right here, and I’ll look into it.”

He holds out his phone in return. “All I ask, man.”

I tap it to transfer the contact. “Fine.”

“Good.”

There’s one last thing - this kid knows who I am with 90% confidence.

It’s tempting to threaten him. Tell anyone what you know, and you quietly disappear. Tell anyone that Tish Cuvier has any connection to the Arrow, and you disappear loudly, in considerable pain, with no one around to hear. But the first rule of threatening people is to mean it, and I don’t.

I want to give him reasons to keep my secret, not to fear it or to start wondering if he’d be safer outing me. Plus, he’s got serious leverage on me. It pays to be polite to people who can ruin your life.

And in the final analysis, he came to me for help, and not once did he suggest he might take advantage of that leverage if I refused. This kid believes in the Arrow, like he believed in Roy Harper. Pretty sure Dad would be annoyed if I fucked that up.

“You know enough about me that, in your shoes, a lot of people who wanted my help wouldn’t have asked nicely.”

“What, like blackmail?” His nose scrunches. “I can’t picture that working out for me.”

“No,” I say pointedly. “But you could have tried.”

He tips his head. “You don’t like that I found you through her.”

Nope. No, I do not.

“It’s like I said before. I’m not here to fuck things up for you.”

That’s probably all the reassurance I’m going to get. I gesture up the street with my bow. “Get moving.”

I move on to my next appointment to threaten and terrorize. This time, I’m looking for gutter punks.

Mom gave me a few leads, and none of the suspects are hard to recognize on sight. The trick is finding them. Their whole thing is transience, and everyone who might be able to locate them distrusts me.

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” says a traveller girl holding back her anxious, growling mutt. Her hands are shaking faintly. “Have you done like a single thing that wasn’t just propping up the system?”

She’s talking to a heavily armed vigilante in a dark alley. Points for bravery. “Easy. I’m not here to hurt you. What’s your dog’s name?”

She frowns at me suspiciously, but automatically she answers, “Marley.”

I sink into a crouch, and I reach into the pocket where Tish sometimes stashes food. “You like beef jerky, Marley?”

Mollified, the girl releases her dog’s collar. “What do you want with those guys anyway?” she asks, watching Marley snarf jerky from my palm. “The worst they do is a tag here and there.”

“No. That’s not the worst.”

She purses her lips, and she hears me out.

Forty-five minutes later, I’ve got two crusties at arrowpoint under an overpass in the Bywater, obediently slouching over to take a seat on a nearby bench. There is lots of grumbling and some name-calling - “conformist tool,” “fucking fascist,” etc - but they’re not exactly veterans of SERE school. It doesn’t take long to get them to talk.

Yes, they tried to torch the vehicles. No, they are not sorry.

“It’s this shitbag mayor,” says the one with the tattooed chin. “His whole family, going back forever, has just been fucking everyone over.”

The one dressed almost entirely in dingy plaid jumps in with, “Robber barons in the Gilded Age.” He nods wisely and continues, obviously by rote memorization: “War profiteers in the twentieth century. Mass murderers and - “ He glances sideways at his buddy.

“And domestic terrorists in the twenty-first century,” says Chin Tattoo.

It sounds strikingly like a memorized canon, and that’s worrisome. It was obviously composed by someone smarter than these two, who hates my family specifically, and that’s downright unsettling. “Where did you hear that?”

Plaid On Plaid starts to answer me, but Chin Tattoo, who seems to be the brains of the operation, such as they are, cuts him off.  “Everyone who can pull up a Wikipedia article on the Queens knows that.”

Plaid On Plaid did not get the warning. He goes on quoting. “When the world has seen what genmod can do, they’ll be remembered for that too.”

You cannot bounce their heads off the concrete wall behind them. It will not help to bounce their heads off the concrete wall. You will not get what you want if you bounce their heads off the concrete wall.

“Arrow,” Tish’s voice says quietly over the comm. “Ask them if they really believe the mayor and his policies are a threat to the city.”

I see the tack she wants me to take. I ask them. I even make it sound sincere.

“This is going to be our generation’s fight,” says Chin Tattoo. “Have you heard of transhumanism? These fucking oligarchs think they’re going to make themselves basically immortal with this shit, right? And they’re going to use everybody else as guinea pigs and as an economic base to fund it.”

“Seems like the kind of thing you should’ve been looking into this whole time,” says Plaid On Plaid, with a righteous sagacity you wouldn’t think achievable by a twenty-four year old whose most recent arrest was for public urination. “Doesn’t it?”

“Then help me look into it,” I reply.

“You know where they keep the mayor.”

I shake my head. “If you know somebody who’s got the big picture on this - and I think you do - then that’s who I want to talk to.”

Plaid scoffs at me. “Trust me, he doesn’t need your help and he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Chin Tattoo elbows him into silence. I doubt I’ll get much more out of them. Time to wrap things up.

“I want you to understand,” I say, raising my bow again, “that what I’m about to do is not because of anything you’ve said tonight.”

They stare at me blankly. “What?”

I draw back an arrow. “It’s because the pressurized struts inside cars can heat up and explode. Metal rods turn into projectiles.”

They stare at the arrowhead, looking pathetically betrayed, as if they were expecting a stern lecture and a swat toward home.

“I want you to imagine what one of those could do to a bystander or a firefighter. Go on, imagine what it would feel like. Now that I have you in the proper frame of mind - ”

There are twin screams, one of pain from Chin Tattoo, and one of fear from Plaid on Plaid, who takes off running. A second later comes the complementary set of screams.

When the blue lights and sirens arrive, Chin Tattoo is still pinned by the hand to the wooden bench and Plaid to a nearby telephone pole. They have screamed themselves raw with a bunch of insults I’m used to and a few I’m not. Apparently I serve kyriarchy, I suck corporate dick, and the leather pants make me look stupid.

“What the hell is kyriarchy?” I ask Tish on the way home.

I hear the click of keys as she Googles. “From the Greek _kyrios_ , meaning lord or master. A social system built on interlocking hierarchies of dominance and submission.”

“He really didn’t have to say that about the pants, though, did he?”

Mom arrives in the lair shortly before I do, just in time to give me her disapproving face. “I wish you hadn’t promised Emanuel we’d help before we know what we’re dealing with.”

I shrug off the jacket and throw it over the weight bench. “It sounds like our kind of thing.”

“Unless it’s a gang war kind of thing. We’re sure he’s not just putting rivals out of business? Because - ”

“I know, I know. We do not do gang wars. No one knows how to do gang wars,” I recite dutifully, “but SCPD doesn’t know how to do gang wars better than we don’t know how to do gang wars.”

We’ve talked in circles around this problem for years.

Since Dad’s day, Team Arrow’s policy has been: the billionaire swanning around like he’s above the law does not beat up on desperate Glades kids any more than he can possibly avoid.

They might be horrifying predatory criminals. Doesn’t matter. He’s still the wrong guy for the job.

The Arrow doesn’t directly help anyone. He doesn’t feed the hungry or tend the sick, he doesn’t tutor underprivileged kids, he doesn’t pass out blankets under bridges in the winter. He neither builds nor makes a damn thing that’s useful to anyone else.

No, the whole idea of the Arrow is that if you hurt the right people, if you make the right people _afraid_ , then everybody else can go about their business. Everybody else can get on with the feeding and educating and building and whatever.

But in patches of ungentrified Glades south of St. Stephen, everyone is already afraid. Metal detectors stand in the doorways of every school, despite the millions Dad has funneled to education in the past thirty years. Clinics in the area wage long, cold wars against preventable public health crises, including infectious diseases that are considered a solved problem in most of North America. The streets and alleys and abandoned lots are all littered with take-out bags, broken glass, and the wreckage of well-intentioned do-goodery.

The neighborhood gangs have a tangled history of insult, injury, and vengeance that’s more difficult to follow than a telenovela. I wouldn’t even know how to identify the bad guys.

I want a drink.

When Mom is gone and I’m back in civvies, I have one. Tish emerges from the shower to find me working on a glass of Havana Club.

Her face falls.

A couple years back, when this job first started grinding me down, I did not handle it gracefully. For about six months, I had exactly three moods: bitchy, bitchy in a hood, and bitchy in a bottle. In response, Tish made no rules regarding my alcohol intake nor any threats to leave me. Instead, she made  _very firm suggestions,_ while saying things like, “This is not a road I’m going to follow you down.”

Suggestions like: No drinking alone. No drinking after the night shift. No drinking not to feel good but to stop feeling bad.

I got the message. So well, in fact, that, “I think I deserve to break the rules this once.”

Tish shrugs. Then she comes over to the table, pulls another glass from the cabinet, and sets it down.

“You don’t like rum,” I remind her.

She pushes the glass closer. I pour just one finger, add plenty of ice, and drown it in Coke. She makes faces after every sip, but her purpose is served. I’m no longer drinking alone.

When I’m down to the last ice cube, I ask, “What if Emanuel’s right about the Black Hand?”

“You’ve already burned their empire down once. I’m sure we can handle one little outpost.”

“What if Emanuel outs me?”

She shrugs. “I suppose we all go to prison.”

“It’s always a toss-up.” I reach for her hand. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  


The next morning, McGinnis calls me. The moment I pick up, without preamble, he says, “I’m missing a virologist.”

I sigh, take my phone off speaker, and slip in an earbud. “Did you look really hard? They’re always in the last place you expect.”

“His name is Ross Franklin, he does his research at Columbia, and no one’s seen him for two weeks. He also knows more than anybody else alive about how to manipulate viruses, and given that someone recently stole a bunch of fugene and lipofectamine and some kind of super-expensive centrifuge from Wayne Enterprises - ”

“From the biotech division?” I get to my feet.

“I told you about that. Given that amazing coincidence, I think he needs to get found. Fast.”

“Fine. I’ll be there by tonight.”

“What? I meant for you to ask your mom and Elaine to - ”

“Mom and Elaine suck at kicking in doors.”

“But Panoptic. And Tish and - and you’ve got shit to do in green.”

That remark is so ridiculous that I just glide right by it. “Can you send me what you have so far, so I’ll be up to speed when I land?” I start heading down the hall.

McGinnis makes a noise that I’ll take as assent. “You can hit the ground running?”

“I’ll be ready to work, assuming you kept my gear maintained.”

Years ago, Wayne stole the specs for my bow, which baffled and pissed Mom off to no end. He had a perfect replica made to stash in the Batcave, and Aunt Thea supplied the extra suit. Max keeps me well-stocked with arrows and flechettes and knives and other fun gadgets.

“Yeah,” McGinnis says irritably. “I work leather oil into your jacket every other Saturday night.”

“That’s a creepy thing for you to do.”

“Sending those files now. I’ll see you tonight.”

I’ve arrived at Mom’s office, and when I tell her I need a plane ticket, she does me one better. “You’ll need an alibi, won’t you? Panoptic can fly you out on business.”

“What kind?”

“The kind where we’re looking into establishing a Gotham branch. Our clients are always bouncing from coast to coast anyway.”

It’s not the first time she’s mentioned expanding. “How pretend is pretend?”

“We’re at seventy-five percent. So you will be doing some actual scouting while you’re there.”

“All right. I can multitask.” I push my luck. “In that case, can I borrow Tish?”

“No, darling child, because she is not an umbrella or a paperback.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I kind of need her around here.”

It was worth a try.

I’ve got one more call to make, to someone I expect will be much happier to hear from me.

“You’re going to be in Gotham?” Abby says, with a smile I can hear from twenty-five hundred miles away. “For how long?”

See, that’s the kind of reception I was looking for. “A couple of weeks, probably.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t booked anything yet.” If I were a less sensitive and respectful friend, I’d have asked McGinnis for the run of Wayne Manor. I could slide down those halls in my sock feet and boxers.

“My pull-out sofa is actually pretty comfortable,” she says hopefully. “If you wanted to stay with me.”

“No, no, no.” I love my sister, but her apartment is either immaculate or a biohazard. There seems to be no in between. “You’re going to want your space, and I’ll be coming and going at odd hours. It’s fine, I’ll get a hotel room.”

“Oh,” she says, audibly wilting. “If that’s what you want.”

Well, shit. “Do I have to share with the damn dog?”

And she’s off, babbling away about all the neighborhood restaurants she plans to introduce me to.

Just before I hang up, she asks, “Are you here looking after Terry? I’ve barely seen him since the funeral, but from what I can tell, he’s kind of having a hard time.”

“That’s part of it, yeah.”

“You guys are really sweet about each other, you know that?”

“Shut up.”

I spend the plane ride reading over what Max sent me, which is not a clear and concise summary of what they know. Instead it is a detailed after-action report on every step they’ve taken over the past three weeks. It’s more work than I could’ve done in six.

That’s because I have other responsibilities and a life outside of the hood. Since we buried Wayne, McGinnis has been doing _nothing_ else.

I arrive in Gotham at sunset, and it’s past dark by the time I make it to Abby’s apartment.

She comes running out of her building’s front door to meet me at the curb. She’s a huggy person, and these days she goes months at a time without seeing me. I have to drag her a few steps before she’ll let go of my neck.

“Whoa, you cut all your hair off,” I say when I get a good look at her.

She grins. “Do you like it?”

Between the dimples and the pixie cut, she looks about thirteen. I am contractually obligated to say, “You know, most women can’t pull that off, but you really can. Looks great.”

Upstairs at her front door, the dog wags so hard he twists a little sideways as he gives me a thorough sniff, and then he shoves his head right into my hands when I get down on the floor with him. “Good boy, Perce. You still remember me?”

He sneezes on me in reply.

“You must be smelly,” Abby says. “Not bad smelly, just laundry detergent smelly. I think he’s allergic.”

This is what happens when you go to an art school in Gotham, I guess. You get so exquisitely sensitive that your dog develops a fragrance allergy.

“Come put your suitcase down.” Abby leads me down a hallway with a giant portrait of Audrey Hepburn taking up one wall. The whole place smells like warm sugar.

“Are you baking something?”

“Cinnamon rolls,” she says with artful offhandedness. Then she gestures into the bedroom at her little double bed and its fluffy pastel comforter. “You’re right in here.”

“I thought I was on the pull-out couch.”

“You thought that? Wow.” She takes my suitcase from me and clumsily drags it into her room. “Everyone knows - ouch - you don’t fit on pull-out couches.”

This kid. She’s taking this hostess thing way too seriously. But I have to admit, the cinnamon rolls are damn good.

“I hope you’re hungry for real food too,” she says. “Terry will be here in ten.”

When he arrives, she pulls a six-layer lasagna out of the oven, because of course she does. It’s not the prettiest thing I’ve ever eaten, but it tastes about right. McGinnis asks if she cheated and bought it frozen, and she jokes back comfortably.

You’d never know that she used to turn pink and silent in his presence. As funny as the crush was, I was glad to see it fade. Not only did it make him justifiably uncomfortable, but all the mooning over him severely compromised his effectiveness as a backup brother. Since she moved to Gotham, she has needed one of those. He’s our contact of last resort whenever she sinks into the radio silence of a depressive episode.

The first time it happened, he called me from the hallway of her dorm room. “She says she’s just tired and wants to be left alone. Do I leave her alone?”

“Fuck, no, you don’t. Hit her with pillows. Pour water on her. Make her get up, and see if you can get her in some sunshine.”

“You want me to hit the depressed kid with pillows?”

“She’s never held it against me.”

According to Abby, what he did instead was pull up her desk chair and offer to hunt down the cheating piece of shit who kicked off this little episode. “I’ll shave off his eyebrows. Cover his bed in cream corn. Put a dead rat in his A/C duct.”

They seem to be actual friends now. It’s a little weird, if only because it happened while I wasn’t looking.

“All right,” McGinnis says a little after nine. “I’m going to borrow him for the rest of the evening.”

“Are you working tonight?”

We established a while back that, while she doesn’t want nerve-wracking details, she does want honesty. “Yeah, a little bit.”

“Okay. I probably shouldn’t wait up, huh?”

I ruffle her hair. “No. I’ll try not to wake you when I come back in.”

McGinnis takes me to Wayne Manor, which has always looked forbidding by night, but looks even moreso with the windows dark. We go round back to the kitchen entrance, and we slip through the southeast wing of the house, which could fairly be described as a bachelor pad. This used to be a place to crash occasionally, when he couldn’t make it home to his downtown apartment. Then Wayne needed round the clock care, and McGinnis moved in. It’s obvious from the takeout containers and dirty clothes that he has never moved out.

He leads me downstairs to the cave, where Max is already at work.

“Hey, Jon,” she says, giving me a polite smile. “I tried to restring your bow, but instructional videos only got me so far. I think everything you need for it is on the bench.”

“Thanks for trying. I’ll take care of it.”

“Did you get a chance to look over what I sent you?”

“I’m up to speed. I’m guessing tonight is recon, looking over the old brewery?”

McGinnis nods. “I want to know the place inside out before we go in. We’ll only get one shot at retrieving Dr. Franklin. If we fuck up, they move him, and it’s back to square one. We’re going to do our homework.”

While I restring the bow, we talk through the maps Max has assembled, identifying exits and likely observation points. Ninety percent of not getting shot is knowing what’s around the corner.

Finally I set the Allen wrench aside and give the bow a few experimental draws. “All right. Let’s suit up.”

My gear in Gotham is not a perfect replica of what I wear at home. The design is a couple of years out of date, since Aunt Thea modifies it periodically. The reinforced weave and the sewn-in armor are the same, but I haven’t spent months breaking the leather in. There are far fewer repaired slashes and bullet holes. And there is no folded letter hidden in the lining of the jacket, just left of center on my chest.

Dad once found the letter while he was detaching the lining for cleaning. He claims he read no further than “Dear Jonathan” in Tish’s handwriting before folding it right back up and giving it to me for safekeeping. “Don’t look so embarrassed,” he told me. “I used to keep something in that same pocket.”

“A sappy letter?” I grumbled.

“No,” he said, eyes on his work. “It was a sonogram.”

I’ve never asked McGinnis if he carries a good luck charm. His gear is designed less like racing leathers and more like armor, and maybe kevlar plating is all the luck you need.

“We’ll ghost in on bikes to within a block, then on foot from there,” McGinnis says, gesturing to the neat row of parked vehicles at the gravelly end of the cave. Five are motorcycles, and I recognize a 2043 model BMW.

I know the roar of that particular engine. I point. “Dibs on that one.”

“Nah, we’re taking the electrics,” Terry says. “No one will hear us coming.”

That is very tactically sound. Damn it.

Just after midnight, we climb on the bikes. Rolling out through the thick mist of the cave mouth never gets any less fun. Against all your instincts you drive straight into a zero-visibility void, and two seconds later you emerge unsquashed on a gravel path through a quiet, overgrown forest. It’s a rush, every single time.

I fall in behind McGinnis, as a matter of courtesy. In Starling he defers to my judgment, and in Gotham I follow his lead.

Over the past four years, we’ve developed a playbook that capitalizes on our respective strengths. I’m devastating with a ranged weapon, and he’s a force of nature in close quarters. He’s effective on a motorcycle, but I can practically do a circus act. I’m a decent free runner, and I can scale a wall to my best vantage point, but he is a ninja, and he can do it  _quietly._

There is rarely any discussion of who gets to kick in which door. It just comes together, because ego has nothing to do with it.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Max says in our ears, dry enough to chap, “but your speedometers have crept up by fifteen miles an hour since you turned onto the highway. Are you racing?”

We glance at each other. We both ease up, and I fall in behind him again.

“Not on purpose,” I mumble.

“There’s no prize for being first to the creepy bunker,” she says, in the slightly condescending voice I associate with phrases like “testosterone poisoning.”

“How do you know?” McGinnis says pointedly. “It’s not like you’ve seen inside.”

I’ve never heard him throw her limitations in her face like that. Max has worked mission control for four years now, and nothing ruffles her feathers like questioning her competence. She never laughs when I remind her of that time she sent me into an almond processing plant and nearly killed me.

“Try not to exceed the speed limit by more than twenty,” she says coolly. “You’ll trip a sensor and have cops on your butt.”

The target is a run-down former microbrewery on the outskirts of the city. It takes us half an hour to work our way through. The whole time, McGinnis and I are slightly off our rhythm.

I can’t anticipate him. One moment, he’s outpacing me and silently expecting me to cover him from above. The next, he’s taking an extra two seconds to scan the area, and I’m nearly jumping the gun. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to his approach, and I can’t march to a drum I don’t hear.

The fourth time it happens, he gives me a reproachful look and says, “Follow my lead, yeah?”

Maybe that’s why neither of us spots the kid on the fire escape until we’ve already scrambled halfway up the building.

The boy looks about seven or eight, and he has wrapped a fleece blanket over his shark-print pajamas. The window stands open behind him, and I hear raised voices from somewhere in the apartment. He stands frozen and slack-jawed, watching us ascend.

“Close your mouth,” I say.

His teeth click together.

“Hey,” McGinnis says gently, but the kid still flinches. The Bat’s voice is rough, even in a conversational tone. McGinnis cranes his neck to look past the kid into the apartment. “Is everything all right?”

There is a pause, then a nod.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. Um.” McGinnis’ eyes dart sideways. Clearly something more inspirational is called for.

I shrug.

So he pats the kid on the shoulder and says: “Follow your heart, kid. And you’ll never go wrong.”

McGinnis, you thieving bastard.

He starts climbing again. Before I follow him, I look the kid dead in the eyes and say, in my most serious voice, “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

His eyes go even wider.

Boom, done. Roles modeled.

We scale the last few floors and clamber onto the roof. I look McGinnis up and down. “The Great Bambino speech? Really?”

I love making the Bat roll his eyes under the fearsome molded brow ridge of his mask. The effect is endearingly ridiculous, like a botoxed millennial struggling to emote. “I didn’t hear you coming up with anything better.”

“It’s best to cultivate an aura of omniscient calm,” I advise. “Don’t say anything, and they’ll assume you’re deep.”

Impatiently, he says, “We got surprised by a second grader. We can’t be that sloppy.”

“Hey, I’ve been trying to follow your lead for the past two hours. You’re the one who keeps breaking with the wrong foot.”

He scowls at me and nods toward on our next target. “Try not to break any windows in this one. You’ve already alerted half the neighborhood we’re here.”

The next hour is pretty frosty. We scour the building with a minimum of conversation, and he gets more terse and snippy with every dead end.

On the last corner of the basement level, I clear my throat and say, “So. Not here.”

There’s a brief pause. “Fine. Let’s go.”

It is a long, circuitous route back to the bikes, taking back alleys to go unseen. We don’t say a word the whole way. I’m considering blocking Max off on comms and asking what the hell his problem is, when he suddenly disappears from in front of me.

Instinctively, I melt into the nearest shadow.

“I just saw movement on the southeast corner of the Capitol One roof,” he says quietly from a neighboring shadow. “Could’ve been nothing, could’ve been something.”

I look, and I wait. “There.” A shape just moved, and it was recognizably human. “We’ve got a definite sneak. Following us?”

“We’ll know for sure in another couple blocks. Let’s get moving. Keep back some and keep an eye out.”

A block away from the bikes, it’s certain: “Fucker’s definitely following us.”

“Let’s turn the tables,” says McGinnis. “You get to your bike. I’ll lead him on another block.”

This way, I can fall back and come up behind our sneak. I duck away at the first available fire escape, and McGinnis moves on along the rooftops. Sure enough, the figure follows him, passing above me on the roof of the building opposite.

“Where’s he headed?” McGinnis asks by comm.

“She.” The figure is wearing a skintight bodysuit. Pretty sure that’s a woman. “Still tailing you.”

“All right, I’m looping back around.”

A little maneuvering, and now we’re tracking her. It’s so much easier to follow someone unseen when you have a team. You switch off, and you can cover far more potential routes. God, I could get used to this.

“Let’s move now,” McGinnis says, as she nears the underpass beneath 22nd Street. “It’s our best chance to hem her in.”

We set up a beautiful pincer. He follows her into the tunnel, and I catch her on the other end.

At least, that’s the plan.

When I round the bend into the tunnel, my night vision shows me no one but McGinnis.

He lets out a strangled, “Mother _fuck_ er!”

“How did we lose her?”

“This fucking bullshit case,” is all he answers. “Fuck!”

Back in Wayne’s basement, I get first shower, probably on account of being a guest. While we wait for McGinnis, Max and I take a seat at her console. She looks like she wants to say something but isn’t sure whether she should.

I can lead the witness. “Has he been like this since the funeral?”

Her shoulders relax just a little, as if it’s a relief not to have to explain. “I’ve never seen him push this hard. Everything has to be perfect, all the time. We have to run at a hundred and ten percent, all the time. This case is important, and I’m afraid of what happens if the people who took Dr. Franklin get what they want. But I’m not literally an all-seeing goddess,” she says wryly. With a bitter glance at the locker room door, she adds, “And if you ask me, going fully nocturnal is taking the bat thing a bit far.”

“I’m guessing you’ve tried talking to him about it.”

She shrugs helplessly. “You’ve been in the field with him. He might listen to you.”

He might talk to me, but I doubt he’ll listen. “He was my big. Still thinks he outranks me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Fraternity thing. Big brother. ”

The sound of running water through the old pipes goes quiet, and Max turns back to her console and busies herself with the log for tonight. When McGinnis appears, still toweling his hair dry, she reaches for her purse and takes her leave.

“See you tomorrow,” he says as she ascends the stairs.

She only waves, which looks pretty noncommittal to me.

He’s on his way to his own glassbook when I say, “Hey, sit down for a minute.”

I’m so surprised when he complies, it takes me a second to gather my thoughts and say, “Are you okay?”

He shrugs. “It’s been a shitty few weeks, but I’m fine. I want to work.”

“I get that. Believe me, I do. But you didn’t return my calls for days. Based on the sheer amount of digging and recon you’ve done in the past month, I assume you've given up sleep. And you’re snapping at Max.”

“Sorry I’m not more fun to be around. I’m just trying to hold it together.”

“You might be holding it a little too tight.”

“I do what I have to. The margin for error is pretty slim here, and I don’t have a half dozen family members watching my back and tripping over themselves to clean up my messes.”

Deep breath. Count down from three. He is bereaved, and you cannot punch him.  “Have you considered, I don’t know, maybe picking up the phone and calling me? I’d have been here days ago if I’d known you were onto something. You want to work, let me help you.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“And if you want to talk,” I say pointedly, “we can do that too.”

He looks away. After a long silence, he says, “Dana came by this afternoon with condolence casserole.”

When Dana Tan broke things off for good, Terry spent a full year walking around with a sucking chest wound. She probably shouldn’t have shown up on his doorstep for any reason. “That’s nice,” is all I know to say. “How is she?”

“Fine. Going skiing in the Alps. Dating the second chair violinist for the Gotham Philharmonic.”

“Maybe you can go one better,” I say, angling for a laugh. “Is the first chair hot?”

Success, even if it is somewhat bitter. “I’ll get right on that. Would you say ‘I’m the vigilante known as the Batman’ is a third date kind of thing, or only after you meet the parents?”

“Point.”

He nods at me. “You lucked out.”

This is true. “I got captured and tortured with my ideal woman.”

“Yeah, nobody is going to fall in my lap like that. Even if they did, they wouldn’t stick around to cheerlead on the sidelines and bottle-feed me Gatorade.”

I bristle. McGinnis has always been drawn to feisty, outspoken women like Dana. He considers Tish entirely too yielding with me, and has advised her in so many words, “Tell him no once in a while, yeah?” But he has never belittled her as some kind of groupie.

“Sorry.” He winces. “That was a dickish way to say it. I mean not a lot of people would go full Army wife like that.”

Dana Tan might have been salt in the wound, but she wasn’t what cut him this time. “I meant if you wanted to talk about the old man. I’m just saying, I’d probably get it.”

That shuts him up. For a long time, he just looks at me, long enough that I start to feel awkward.

At last, he says, “After Roy Harper died, that’s, um. That’s not what I said to you.”

“Well, no. Different circumstances, right?”

“I mean the few months after.”

Right. The few months he spent treating me like a friendly colleague, while he decided how he felt about me exsanguinating two people and smashing another one’s head like a pumpkin. I shift my weight over my feet. “Yeah, so?”

“I’d be kind of an asshole to lean on you now when I wasn’t. You know.” He looks away. “Wasn’t there.”

I can’t help it. My lip curls. “That’s your problem?”

He shrugs uncomfortably.

“That was almost four years ago.”

Another shrug. At least he’s starting to look ashamed of himself.

“I’m going to pretend you never said anything that stupid, and I’m just going to level with you, all right? I know you’re trying to live up to him. It’s what I’d be doing.”

Hell, it’s what I do. Night after night.

“We both know a little something about… you know. About legacies.”

He clears his throat, and he reaches for an unfinished throwing star on the workbench nearby. He runs his finger along the blunted edge. “You want a drink?” he says at last.

I look at him sideways. “I don’t feel like going out.”

He points upstairs. “The bar up there is better stocked than anywhere we could go.”

The manor is ghostly with white sheets draped over the remaining furniture, and sound bounces strangely off echoing stone and muffling fabric. We end up on the floor, passing a bottle back and forth between us. It’s a Louis XIII cognac, because when you have the run of Bruce Wayne’s liquor cabinet, why not a thousand dollar special vintage?

I gesture around us with the bottle. “What happens to this place now?”

“I don’t know. All that time to plan, and he never said.”

“Seems like an oversight.”

“There were a lot of things he never fucking said.”

We keep drinking. It goes down smooth.

“I always kind of thought that one day he’d tell me everything,” Terry says, letting his head loll against the wall. “I’d have earned it. I’d be all the way in. He’d finally spill about the early days, or about why he did this and then why he stopped. Maybe I’d finally figure out why he was what he was.”

“I think he was born a Tomahawk cruise missile,” I say, bullshitting with the confidence of the inebriated. “His parents’ death just gave him a target.”

“Sure, that sounds as plausible as anything Gordon has ever said about him.”

“What does she say?”

“That you don’t try to explain a hurricane while you’re in the middle of it.” He passes the bottle back to me. “No, he took his secrets to the grave. I should’ve known he would.”

My father once told me that, with the people he loved, he regretted more lies than truths. He has spent the past thirty years loosening his white-knuckled grip on his secrets. But when he goes, I’m sure he’ll be taking some with him. The old guard saw too much and did too much for it to happen any other way.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter, in the end,” McGinnis says heavily. “I don’t have to understand him to do what I do.”

“No, but it sure as shit helps.”

He laughs bitterly. “About as soon as the dirt settled over his casket, Amanda Waller came to talk to me.”

I’d bet my inheritance she did not show up with a casserole and her condolences. “What did she want?”

“She used the word partnership a few times. Support. Broadening my base of resources. Threw in a few bribes for Max too - new equipment, that kind of thing.”

“She wants the Batman working for her.”

“If she had human emotions instead of - I don’t know - little transistors and diodes in there, she’d have realized how transparent she was. Acting like I was all grief-stricken and adrift, and she was throwing me a ring buoy.”

“You told her to fuck off?”

“She has a fleet of Predator drones. I was polite.” He takes the bottle back. “But she doesn’t get to co-opt everything he built. She’d twist it into something he never intended.”

“Where does she get off pretending that they were even on the same side?” Waller’s not on anybody’s side, except maybe for some abstract concept of “the greater good.” Everybody loves the greater good until it’s their turn jumping into the meat grinder to feed everyone else.

“The thing is,” he says wearily, “I don’t know what he intended. We never really talked about it.”

“He must have figured you knew.”

He nods, but there’s no conviction in it.

When I get back to Abby’s apartment at two o’clock in the morning, she’s asleep on the sofa with one arm sticking out awkwardly and the blankets tangled around her legs. Over in his squishy bed in the corner, Percy lifts his head and starts swishing his feather duster tail across the wood floor. He makes a deep, throaty noise that’s not quite a bark. It sounds like, “Burf.”

Worst guard dog ever.

“Jonny?” my sister says blearily.

“You can go back to sleep. Everybody’s good.”

Hey, it’s mostly true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "People who probably aren't bad can kill you."
> 
> \- Terry Pratchett, _Thud_
> 
> “Remember kid, there’s heroes and there’s legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Follow your heart, kid, and you’ll never go wrong.”
> 
> \- _The Sandlot_ (1993)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon makes an acquaintance, and Team Bat finally gets a lead.

My stay in Gotham drags on.

Mom has given me actual Panoptic responsibilities while I’m here, so my days are often spent meeting with Gotham’s private security sector. Starling is a busy port, and we’re headquarters to more than our share of venture capitalists and tech giants, but Gotham is a bonafide megacity. The market here is bigger and far more competitive.

“We’d need a niche,” I tell Mom the next time she calls. “We could market to one specific industry here, just to differentiate ourselves.”

She makes a noncommittal noise. “I should’ve moved on this when Bruce was alive.”

They were barely on speaking terms. “Would he have helped?”

“I like to think so.”

In the meantime, Abby manages to cross three bullet points off her list of Things to Do in Gotham with Jonny. The other seventeen will have to wait for a week when she is not in rehearsal until ten o’clock every night.

My night shift runs even later. For nearly a week, McGinnis and I push hard. We kick in doors and swing onto rooftops and run down leads, but none of it turns up Ross Franklin. It does nothing for McGinnis’ mood either.

Top priority is the stranger following us. The only characteristics we have identified are: a) probably female and b) sneaky as fuck. Max has nothing to go on, so the only way to track her down is to play bait and set a trap. Unfortunately, as tasty as we are, for nights on end she refuses to bite.

“Maybe she’s done with us, now that we made her.”

“I don’t like it,” McGinnis grumbles.

A week into my stay, Abby’s show goes to final dress. She invites me as a courtesy, with no expectation I’ll actually show up. To my surprise, McGinnis says irritably, “We’re spinning our wheels here. Go be supportive.”

Musicals don’t thrill me. This one seems to be about how TV dance-offs solved race relations in sixties Baltimore. I pay attention when Abby’s onstage, playing a note-perfect prissy bitch in a blonde wig. But mostly I’m texting Tish. When she realizes I’m at a live performance, she stops responding.

Abandoned and bereft, I let my eyes wander. Up to the rafters, along the rigging, into the shadows.

Somebody’s up there.

That shadow isn’t part of the production. Abby has been yammering at me about this show for the past week, and if someone were going to jump down dramatically for some wire work, she would have mentioned. I slip away up the aisle.

I’ve picked Abby up from the backstage entrance once or twice. I can find my way to the dressing rooms. It’s busy, and there’s no way to avoid being seen entirely. Luckily the cast and crew is too focused to pay me any mind when I slip down the hall and head for the wings.

I find a ladder and quietly climb high enough to get a line of sight on that rafter.

The figure hasn’t moved. Something about the posture makes me think female. She looks almost feline, perched on a beam too narrow to balance comfortably. But she seems perfectly at her ease, as if she bought a ticket for precisely that spot. In dark grays and blacks, supernaturally still, she is only a silhouette to me.

A familiar silhouette.

There is no weapon at her hip or slung over her back, for what that’s worth. Still, I reach for the reassurance of the knife in my pocket.

Across the stage from my vantage point, Abby steps up between the wings. She waits patiently for her cue, then rushes into the scene. The music shifts, and I feel a dance number coming on.

There’s a platform probably used by the lighting crew, just a few feet from where the silhouette is perched. That’s as far as I need to go.

I can move pretty quietly when I need to. Dad spent many a weekend daring me to sneak up on him and shooting me with a paintball gun the second he pinned my location. At close range, those things bruise, and nothing teaches like bruises.

I get within fifteen feet of the shape, and at this angle I can see her face. Asian features, cute nose. She is smiling at the dance number below us - smiling like a kid still at the age where reality and make-believe kind of blur. She looks utterly taken in by it.

It’s Freckles. Cassie, the girl who came to Paul’s rescue after the funeral. And she is most definitely staring at my sister.

No more sneaking around. I grab the railings and haul myself up and over to the lighting crew’s platform, quietly but not silently. Her head whips around, and her eyes get very large. I kneel down as close as the rigging permits, and I whisper, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Distressed but not guilty, she makes a helpless sort of gesture toward the stage.

“Yeah. That’s my sister. What are you doing?”

Cassie lets go of her grip on the beam, and instinctively I reach out to steady her. But she’s perfectly balanced. She sways faintly with the music, then nods meaningfully down at them.

This is not my kind of weird. I gesture her toward the crew platform. “Get down from here. Come talk to me.”

It’s like I’ve declared bedtime and dragged her away from  _ Barbie: Fairytopia _ .

“Yes. Now.”

She does as I told her. I offer an arm to help her cross the gap, but she just sort of… flows right across and through the wide-set wooden slats of the railing. I couldn’t tell you the details of how she ducked beneath the handrail, what she used for an anchor, or how she tucked her feet under her so neatly and straightened up. It was all one smooth motion.

I follow her down the ladder and then lead the way through the wings. She keeps pace right at my elbow, glancing up at my face occasionally as we go.

In the empty hall, I turn to her. “Look, this is a weird thing to do, and people doing weird things to get a look at my sister kind of puts me on edge. You want to explain?”

She frowns in concentration. “Pretty,” she says. The words come one at a time, like she’s rummaging for them in an oversized handbag, pulling them out, and lining them up. “Feel.” She clenches her fist and presses it against her sternum, and she nods hopefully, willing me to understand. “Feel.”

She has no discernible accent, but English does not sound like her first language. Or her second or third.

I could have sworn we had a brief conversation the day of the funeral, but now that I think back - no. All she told me was her name. The rest was her eyes and her smile and the tip of her head, and my brain filled in the words. I’ve had the same thing happen to me with Sam. He’s teased me about Tish with just his facial expression.

This girl hears just fine. There must be something deeper going on. Maybe some kind of developmental disorder.

I try for an easy question: “Did you recognize my sister?”

Nod.

“Is that why you came?”

She shakes her head. Then she bends her knees and turns a pirouette. I’ve seen Tish do them, and I always thought they looked silly. This must be what they are supposed to look like. “Pretty,” Cassie says again, more confidently this time.

I don’t know how to ask why she was following me and the Bat. Jonathan Queen has no reason to know that. But I downgrade the threat level significantly. There is something uncomfortably childlike about her. It’s easy imagine her tailing us out of pure curiosity.

“You know Sara Lance, don’t you?”

She eyes me suspiciously, but eventually she nods.

“Is she here in Gotham?”

That, she won’t answer. Fine. Sara can tell me herself.

I look Cassie over. Do I run her off? Let her go back to the rafters?

I want her where I can keep an eye on her. “Come sit down, if you want to watch. Yes, come on. This way.”

Tentatively she follows me back down the aisle, and she perches on the edge of a seat two over from me. She watches the rest of the show like that, bent forward and rapt.

I half expect her to take off as soon as the curtain comes down, but instead she follows me up the aisle and lingers in my shadow in the lobby. She watches faces go by, not with the absent-mindedness of casual people watching, but with a more determined curiosity.

When Abby appears, she isn’t alone. McGinnis’ little brother walks alongside her, carrying her bag. Little is no longer accurate. Matthew McGinnis is nearly my height and just as broad across the shoulders.

“Jon, were you here this whole time?” he says. “I thought you couldn’t make it.”

I catch Abby pitching into a hug and say over her head, “I got freed up for the evening. Nice job, Abby.”

She grins. “Did you enjoy your nap?”

“I was watching. You were blonde and mean, and you lost.”

Abby turns to Cassie in polite confusion. “Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met before.”

“Cassie,” I supply. “Cassie, this is my sister Abby.”

Cassie casts her eyes down briefly, and then she tips her head and reaches hesitantly for Abby’s wig. Carefully she sounds out, “Nice job.”

Matt is too good-natured to laugh at her, much as he’s tempted. Abby glances at me to see how weirded out she should be, and she takes my silent word for it that there’s no cause for alarm. She manages a smile that is only slightly puzzled. “Thank you.”

It strikes me that the two girls are almost exactly the same height. Same age, too.

Matt, the friendliest person in the Gotham metropolitan area, suggests finding dinner somewhere nearby. He even makes eye contact with Cassie as he says it, pointedly including her.

“Oh God, I couldn’t,” Abby says. “I’d fall asleep at the table.”

I reach for her bag. Surprised, Matt hands it over. Was he expecting to carry it all the way home for her?

We take our leave, and on the L-train home, I elbow Abby's side. “Since when do you and Matt hang out?”

“Since I spent a whole summer at his house. Who was that girl, really?”

“You may have seen her wrapped around a bad guy’s neck at Wayne’s funeral. Beyond that, your guess is good as mine."

“She’s kind of, um…” Abby struggles to say it sensitively. “She’s not quite. You know.”

The train sways slightly around a curve. “I’d say she’s pretty far from quite.”

  
  


Next morning at breakfast, Abby looks up from her phone to ask me, “Is something going on with Dad?”

“Why do you ask?”

“He’s been sending those good morning texts more often lately.” At my confused silence, she prompts, “You know how he’ll just send ‘love you, have a good day’ or ‘good luck with the whatever’ or maybe just a picture from around the house?”

This is the first I’m hearing about this obviously well-established tradition of sappy Dad texts. “I guess he sends  _ you _ shit like that.”

“Oh.” She sounds slightly embarrassed. “The fact that you call it ‘shit like that’ is probably why he doesn’t do it to you. But anyway, the last few have been more sentimental than usual, and it’s making me worry about him a little bit.”

“Yeah.” Do I tell her or not? Yeah, I think I tell her. “He’s on some kind of medication now, and he’s been cagey about what it’s for.”

“You think it’s something serious?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s just getting old, thinking about time passing, getting all mushy. That kind of thing.”

“I guess so,” she says, sounding dissatisfied.

I ruffle her hair on my way out. “Got a meeting. See you later.”

Sara is, in fact, here in Gotham. At a sidewalk cafe, where the street noise makes us hard to overhear, she greets me with a fierce hug around the middle. That’s as high as she can comfortably reach on me.

“You caught her tailing you,” she says as we sit down. “Very few people would have.”

“McGinnis did. How many nights didn’t we spot her?”

“Only two.” She smiles. “What would you like to know?”

Where do I even start? Explain to me where she learned to move and to fight like that. Explain what she wants with us. Explain why she’s so goddamn weird. “Why doesn’t she talk?”

Thoughtfully, Sara tips her head and fiddles with her napkin. Maybe I’ve asked a bigger question than I realized. Finally she looks up at me and says, “No one taught her how.”

All that buildup for a bullshit answer like that? “If you won’t answer me, just say so.”

“I’m serious. She was kept isolated as a child, and she didn’t hear spoken language until she was maybe seven or eight. The psychologist on staff says that if you don’t learn a language - any language - when you’re little, you’re not likely to completely master one later. There’s a window or something.”

I sit back in my chair.

“It’s a real thing,” she says impatiently. “There are documented cases. Google it.”

“Kept isolated,” I repeat. “By who?”

“Her father was not a nice man.” She looks at the table again, then says without shame or regret, “I killed him the winter of ‘41. It didn’t seem right to just leave her there.”

So that’s what kept Sara from flying into Starling when Captain Lance’s condition was deteriorating. She was busy killing a man and taking in his badly adjusted teenager.

“Who was he?” I ask.

“A murderer for hire,” she says contemptuously. “One of the best in the business, I’ll give him that. His idea was to forge a living weapon. Deprive her of speech, so her only language would be body language. Keep her away from other people, blunt her sense of empathy.”

She loves  _ Hairspray _ and does pirouettes. “It doesn’t seem like it worked.”

Sara rocks her hand in a so-so gesture.

In addition to the pirouettes, I’ve also seen Cassie distribute traumatic brain injuries. “All right. She doesn’t talk, but she understands?”

“As of the last time we tested her, she understands as much as the average eighth grader. She’s come a long way in a few years.”

I can only assume “we” means ARGUS. It sounds like Cassie’s father was an iron-plated son of a bitch. Sara must have killed him as a last resort when she was unable to take him into custody. Why else would she tell me about it so bluntly?

My only evidence for this theory is that she has always been nice to me personally, and that once upon a time I called her Aunt. Maybe she played The Floor is Lava with me in the morning and killed people at night. Human beings are perfectly capable of that kind of compartmentalization, as any history book can tell you.

But Dad regards her with the same inalienable trust you usually see among combat veterans. “Her code isn’t my code,” he once said, “but she does have one.”

So I’m going to run with this. “Does Cassie, ah. Does she know you did that?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” This is next level weirdness. “Why was she following us?”

“I asked her to keep an eye on you, in case you ran into trouble.”

“Backup. Wouldn’t that be a luxury.” I don’t hate the idea of a living weapon so long as she’s on my team. “Will she coordinate with us to find Ross Franklin?”

“I already told you.” There’s that distinctive dimple in Sara’s chin. “She likes you.”

“This would all go a lot smoother if you made some proper introductions.”

Sara cocks her head. “Is Terry on board?”

Terry is two hundred pounds of bitterness wrapped in kevlar at present, and he didn’t fight directly beside her at Wayne’s funeral. “He’ll take some convincing. Give me the evening to soften him up.”

She laughs at my phrasing. “With roses and champagne?”

“I thought I’d drag him to the floor and crank his arm behind his back.”

Still chuckling, she says, “Call me when you manage it.”

Sparring generally puts McGinnis in a more accommodating frame of mind. I’ve known this since my freshman year, when he went easier on the pledges the day after a practice match. I’m pretty sure it would work on me too - there’s nothing like getting your blood humming doing something you’re good at - but no one has ever tried it on me. To my knowledge.

“So I talked to Sara today,” I tell McGinnis, facedown on the floor with my arm cranked behind my back.

He lets up, and in a promisingly neutral tone, he says, “About what?”

I accept a hand up, and I jerk my head toward Max, over at her console. I only want to say this once, so let’s do it in her hearing.

I fill them in, and they nod along patiently. Max seems distracted by the alerts popping up on her computer.

McGinnis is not jumping up and down excited about sharing his intel with strangers, and he’s definitely not sold on working with Cassie. “We don’t know how she operates, and it sounds like just communicating with her is going to be a challenge.”

“She’s helped us before.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tell them this, but it seemed relevant: “And she’s one of Sara’s.”

“That means she’s one of Waller’s.”

“So we trust her as far as we can throw her. She’s, what? Five-five? One-thirty? We could launch her pretty far.”

“Why is she willing to help us?”

“Altruism. A deep and innate sense of justice.” I shrug. “Sara told her to.”

“I’m not sure I find that as comforting as you do,” Max said, and McGinnis makes a noise of agreement.

That’s fair. As far as Team Bat is concerned, Sara Lance is the former Assassin who keeps questionable company and refuses to tell us what she does for a living. Neither of them has childhood memories of playing The Floor Is Lava with her.

“But we could use the backup,” Max points out. “If you’re going to storm the castle, better three than two.”

“Three who haven’t trained as a team,” he grumbles.

“At the funeral, she was scary good at anticipating me,” I point out. “That might not be a problem.”

“Right, fine.” He gives Max a grudging nod. “Better three than two.” Finally, McGinnis gestures around the Bat Cave and says, “They’re not coming here. We’ll meet in some neutral location. Suited up.”

I expected that. McGinnis does not issue invitations down here lightly, and I wouldn’t risk it either.

“And then on to your target,” Max says, wearing the lopsided, almost smug smile that means she’s found something. “I know where Dr. Franklin is.”

M cGinnis and I arrive at the meet armed for bear, because our next stop is deep in hostile territory. It’s not the friendliest way to say hello to the new kid, but it can’t be helped.

Sara and Cassie timed it perfectly. They arrive just as we do in the shadowed alley behind a fairly plain and innocuous office building not far from downtown. It’s deserted at this time of night, and it’s on our way to the target. We’re unlikely to be interrupted.

In jeans and a gray coat that swallows her small figure and washes her out, Sara looks utterly unremarkable. No one who walked past her would remember her face or much about her. Cassie emerges from the shadows behind her, and she is dressed in the same skintight outfit we saw a few nights ago. It looks like a dancer’s costume, if Swan Lake were performed by Special Forces. Strapped across her back is a quarterstaff, protruding over her shoulder.

I give her a friendly wave. She smiles at me, and it is downright unsettling.

McGinnis gives her a polite nod. “What do you go by in the field?”

Slowly and carefully, she sounds out,  “Orphan Four.”

“Oh.” McGinnis and I exchange glances. He clears his throat. “All right. Orphan.”

“Cassie,” I say, “who gave you that name?”

She just looks back at me blankly, and Sara’s expression darkens.

“Right.” Who would name an orphan Orphan? And what kind of callous bitch might have pulled that shit three times before? “Waller.”

“We’re in something of a hurry tonight,” the Batman says briskly. “We believe we’ve found Dr. Franklin.” He holds out a hand to Cassie and says, “We could use your help.”

She shakes his hand with odd formality, like she’s following stage directions, and she lays a hand over the throwing stars at her hip. Ready to go.

“All right.” McGinnis pulls an extra earpiece from his utility belt, and he doesn’t even fumble in the wrong pocket first. Impressive, given that there seem to be several dozen of them. “Oracle will be on comms with us, keeping us oriented. I think it’s best if you stick close to the Arrow and work as a team.” He glances around for Cassie’s ride. “How did you get here?”

“My car,” Sara supplies.

I gesture Cassie toward my bike. “Come on, then. You can ride with me.”

Sara smiles and turns for the door. “You kids have fun.”

On the way, for Cassie’s benefit, Max summarizes what we painstakingly worked through in the cave. “Dr. Franklin is being held in an old condo building in the Warehouse District that’s currently being ‘remodeled.’ There are multiple armed guards and at least four security cameras on the exterior. There are definitely more inside, and there’s got to be at least one guard on the doctor.”

The electric bikes glide soundlessly into the neighborhood, and we stash them under a construction scaffold in a quiet little alley. Quick and quiet, we scale the scaffold and make our way a few buildings over by rooftop. Cassie looks just as comfortable up here as she did on that rafter.

Our target comes into view. It’s nineteenth century construction: five stories and nearly half a block of red brick with tall, papered-over windows. Before it was trendy condominiums, it was a cannery, and it’s built to industrial scale. The building is smooth faced, except for the window sashes. If we want in, our best bet is the mess of tarps and scaffolding on the rooftop, where a breach is under repair.

McGinnis takes the south face of the building, and Cassie and I circle around to the far side. She seems happy to follow our lead. She takes note of cameras and armed guards, but I have no idea how well she grasps the larger objective.

Hello, CCTV camera here. Hello, sentry there. My, what a nice assault rifle you have, sir.

“Arrow, at least pretend to take this seriously,” Max says in my ear.

Ah. I said that out loud. “What are you talking about? Don’t you want a sitrep?”

“Looks like two cameras on each corner,” McGinnis interrupts with a note of impatience.

I reach over my shoulder for my bow. “You want me to take care of the two I’ve got eyes on?”

“Please.”

It’s smooth and natural as breathing. Sight, draw, loose. An arrow thuds into the mortar between bricks within three inches of the twin cameras’ mounting.

“Shit, that was a nice shot,” McGinnis says.

Surprised into sincerity, I say, “Thanks.”

Carefully, I work my way around the building, disabling the setup on each corner.  The fewer recordings anyone has of us, the better. Timing my shots to avoid the sentries’ notice takes a few minutes, during which Cassie and McGinnis keep track of their movements. He figures out that she can handle yes or no questions fairly well. “Mm hmm” and “Unh-unh” aren’t standard voice procedure and I can see them getting really difficult to differentiate in a heated moment, but for now in the tense quiet, they’re clear enough.

“Orphan, can you hold position and make some noise if the sentry on that wall stops his rounds?”

“Mm-hmm.”

But Mom’s specialty arrowheads must work exactly as designed, because both armed guards keep up their leisurely stroll around the building. I arrive back at Cassie’s side.

“All right, top down search,” McGinnis says. “I’ve got a broken third floor window on the south face. What do you have?”

“Couple of service hatches, or failing that, the gaping hole in the roof. We’ll find a way in.”

“Let’s go.”

Max helpfully turns down the volume on the comms for us, because it’s distracting to have someone else’s heavy breathing in your ear.

The easiest way to the roof is probably my GTFO arrow. It’s going to be loud, slamming into the metalwork of the scaffolding, and we can’t expect that to go unnoticed. I can’t just shoot the sentry. Unless I do it right through his eye, he’s still going to be able to alert his buddies.

“Orphan, can you give me an opening?”

It’s almost too easy. Cassie pushes over a trash can, he comes to investigate, and I step up behind him. Then all of a sudden he goes to sleep.

“Let’s get up on that roof.”

It takes me a moment to line up my shot; the weight distribution on the GTFO arrow is considerably weirder than my standard broadheads. It spirals up in a precarious-looking wobble, trailing line, and then with a clatter it catches in the scaffolding. I give it a few experimental tugs, and then I hold out my arm to Cassie. “Come here and hold tight.”

She does her best to give me the use of my limbs, but there is no comfortable way.

“It’s fine, just wrap yourself around me. It won’t be nearly as weird as the time I had to take the Bat up with me.”

The grappling gun fires off, and with a jerk the ground falls away beneath us. We lose speed halfway, and I fire the next canister of compressed air. The mechanism stops at the cornice, where the line bends, and I get my feet braced against the brick and start hauling us up. Cassie helps as much as she’s able.

Which is not much. “That’s my neck. Need to breathe. Thank you.”

On the comm, McGinnis chuckles. “Be gentle with him, Orphan.”

We clamber up onto the roof. Well, I clamber. She  _ alights _ , nimble and weightless as Tinkerbell.

Both of the service hatches are sealed tight. We take the half-repaired hole in the roof, with its rusted-out support beams and decayed timber. Tinkerbell flits through, and I manage to follow her without giving myself tetanus.

We land in nearly-identical crouches, back to back and scanning the hallway we’ve fallen into. Clear in both directions.

“We’re in,” I murmur to Oracle and the Bat.

“Same. On the move.”

So far, so sneaky.

We have no idea where in the building Dr. Franklin is being held. It’s nerve-wracking, searching room to room down unfamiliar halls where you might turn a corner straight into the muzzle of a gun. There is a reason nobody likes sending troops to clear buildings in urban settings.

Cassie keeps pace with me and watches my back. No, I should say Orphan watches my back. This isn’t the girl I pulled from the rafters at the Orpheum Theater. This is someone else, alert and unsmiling and efficient.

At the next corner, we surprise a guard. Orphan gets to him first.

It is like a National Geographic documentary. The snow leopard leaps in slow motion to tear the throat out of something innocent and fluffy, and the whole thing has a feeling of total inevitability to it. The way she breaks his arm at the elbow is gorgeous, and the impact of his body facedown on the floor is the couplet at the end of a poem. There is no uncertainty, no wasted effort.

With a man unconscious at her feet, Cassie seems grimly pleased with her work. She looks to me expectantly, and only when I jerk my head down the hallway does she get moving again.

Finally we come upon a suite of what might once have been offices, where a man in dusty black paces the hallway.

“Batman, there’s a guard at this door.”

“There must be something there to guard. Find out what.”

We take the guard out, and Cassie tries the door. Locked. She steps away and gestures at it politely, as if to say, “If you would.” It’s just a deadbolt, and the wood around it splinters when I slam into it hard enough. The third time.

The door bursts open and smacks off the wall with a noise like a gunshot.

On the other side, Dr. Franklin is up against the far wall, armed only with an outdated glassbook. The room is furnished with a desk, a cot, and a bucket. It smells of harsh cleaning products, unwashed middle-aged man, and the contents of the bucket.

He’s not in great shape. Fading yellow bruises cover the left side of his face. He has the twitchy, haggard look of someone who has been afraid for too many consecutive hours. As far as getting out of here smoothly, he might be almost as much of a problem as the remaining guards.

“Hey, Dr. Franklin,” I say as gently as I can. I hold up both hands in the universal gesture of not-currently-trying-to-kill-you. “It’s all right.”

Cassie hovers near my shoulder. She won't be helping me talk this guy down, and two of us blocking the door can’t possibly make him feel better. I give her a jerk of my head, and she retreats to the hallway.

“We’re not here to hurt you. Are you ready to get out of here?”

The glassbook in his hands starts to vibrate as the shakes take over. Hoarsely he says, “You’re the Arrow.”

I manage not to ask whether it was the bow or the green hooded leather outfit that gave me away. God knows I’ve said some stupid, obvious shit when feeling a little shocky. “That’s right,” I say soothingly. “If you could please come with us, we’ll get you home as soon as we can.”

He sets the glassbook down on the cot and takes a few uncertain steps forward. There we go.

“You woke the whole building with that noise,” McGinnis reminds me. “They’re going to be on you in thirty seconds.”

I invite the doctor through the remains of the door ahead of me. “Somebody definitely heard that. We’ll need to be quick.”

In the hall, he stares at the unconscious guard on the floor and steps around him as if he were a cobra. It makes me wonder who gave Dr. Franklin those bruises.

The first wave of bad guys comes pounding up the far stairwell, and their footsteps are audible from all the way down the hall. They round the corner with weapons trained on us, but they don’t open fire. They would rather not kill their prize if they can possibly help it, given the resources they spent stealing him in the first place. They pull knives instead, intending to kill us the old-fashioned way. Handcrafted and organic. Artisanal death.

That’s their first mistake.

Their second is to focus their attention on me. I’m bigger, closer, and wearing a recognizable uniform. They instantly judge me the bigger threat, and three out of four of them close in on me.

But there isn’t room in this hallway for all three to slam into me without getting in each other’s way. One has to hang back, and by the time I’ve bounced his friends’ skulls off the wall and my knee, respectively, Cassie is already on him.

Next moment he curls up around a broken knee, making little keening noises. She turns to me with the same calm, attentive “What now?” expression. Her father forged a weapon, but apparently someone has to aim it. 

Dr. Franklin has flattened himself against the wall, and he stares at us both, looking ready to bolt.

“Doctor, I’m going to need you to move fast and do exactly as I say,” I tell him. “We’ve got to get to an exit.”

Cassie and I hustle him away between us.

If it were just me and Cassie, it would be easier to go up than down. We’ve already cleared the top couple floors, and the remaining shitheads are all below us. But I have a feeling a zipline escape is going to be beyond Dr. Franklin. He’s already wobbly on his feet. He’s a fifty-something year old nerd, and I doubt he’s been well fed or well rested for the past two weeks.

McGinnis has been circling around to meet us, and he’s running into trouble of his own. He has no protective doctor-shaped talisman, and I can hear gunfire, both from the other end of the building and over the comm. There is a tiny delay between one noise and the other.

Three shots ring out. Then three more.

“Batman?” I demand.

“Still alive,” he says in a pained voice. “Armor’s dented. I tied up as many of the bastards as I could, but there are still four more on the lower level, and they’re headed your way.”

“Then it’s up and out,” I say, breaking into a jog for the nearest stairwell. “Dr. Franklin, keep close.” I’ll have to rig something to make sure he gets from one rooftop to the other without losing his grip.

We come around the next corner, and I pull up short just in time to not get stabbed.

I’m face to face with a woman dressed all in shades of gray, with a dark blue headscarf wrapped and pinned to cover everything but her eyes. She carries an honest-to-God sword, short and thick in the style of a Roman gladius.

Men in less theatrical gear crowd in behind her, armed with knives and collapsible batons.

“You three,” the woman tells them. “Kill the Arrow.”

And she turns all her attention to Cassie.

I’ve already broken a lot of shitheads' faces tonight. Still, these three charge right at me.  One of them could have forced me out of the position I’ve established with Cassie protecting one flank and a wall the other. Another might have lunged at me, forced my attention onto him. The third could have darted into the opening he provided.

I could be very thoroughly dead right now. Instead they’re flailing at me like brats around a pinata.

In my peripheral vision, Cassie narrowly sidesteps a swing of that sword. The woman in gray moves almost as fast as she does, and she has a longer reach.

If this were a cage match, Cassie and I would have no trouble with the four of them, provided we were careful and somewhat patient. Instead we’ve got a scared civilian behind us. If he bolts and we lose him, he’s likely to get shot or recaptured.

“More headed your way,” McGinnis says in my ear.

One of the men tries to slip past us and make a grab for Dr. Franklin, who is doing his damnedest to pry the service door open. That decides it.

“Got you covered,” I bark at Cassie, who is closer to the doctor. “You help him!”

A swing of her staff forces Faceless to backpedal a few steps, and in the space she’s created, I step smoothly into her place.

Faceless makes an unsuccessful jab at my guts, and I fling a flechette at the meat of her leg. In one motion she twists out of the way and takes another swing at me, which is weird enough to throw me off balance.

I’ve put in thousands of hours in training and real combat, and I will never be used to swords. The guys who try to cut me generally do it with stilettos and switchblades, like respectable criminal scumbags. “This is some Dark Ages bullshit.”

Behind me, there is a crunch and a scream. One glance over my shoulder - Cassie is chivvying Dr. Franklin through the exit.

Time to put paid to any pursuit. I take a calculated risk and sacrifice my guard to get close to her.

The gladius slices through my leathers and opens a shallow cut on my forearm, but it doesn’t even slow me down. My forearms are already a crisscross of scars from defensive wounds. The gut punch sends Faceless sprawling, but she comes up in a controlled roll. Her diaphragm is spasming, but still she crawls weakly after us.

I herd the other two toward the emergency exit. “Up and out.”

On the rooftop, McGinnis is waiting for us. For a bare second, I see him the way our enemies do - hulking above us, backlit by the glow of streetlights, horned and monstrously proportioned. Then he leaps down from the scaffolding, and I get a good look at his dented armor. Shit, someone shot him square in the chest. He’s going to hurt tomorrow.

He gives the civilian’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “I had a hell of a time finding you, Dr. Franklin. Good to see you in one piece.”

For me, the doctor had a painfully obvious remark. For the Batman, he can only stare.

“Arrow, take us out of here? Oracle, if you could send the Canary around with the car.”

I aim for an exterior HVAC system on a rooftop one floor below us, and the GTFO arrow flies true. As I anchor our zipline down tight, McGinnis sees to a jury-rigged harness around Franklin’s waist and hips. Cassie keeps watch, and her jaw sets at the sound of distant shouting.

“Once we’re across, it’s a block and a half to a vehicle,” I tell Dr. Franklin as I clip a carabiner to McGinnis’ handiwork. The bandanna has stuck to my bleeding arm, and the rough fabric must be stuck to exposed flesh, because the damn thing burns out of all proportion to its severity. “Then we’re gone. You ready?”

He frowns at the blood I’ve dripped on his already-filthy sleeve. “You’re injured.”

For God’s sake, focus, buddy. “I’m going first, and you’re right after me. Big push off the ledge, all right? You want some momentum.”

He looks me in the eyes, or close enough under the mask and hood. “I can do that.”

“See you over there.” And I helpfully demonstrate the appropriate technique.

My feet touch down on the neighboring roof just as our friends downstairs figure out which side of the building we’re on. Excited shouts echo up the bare faces of the buildings, and I lean over the ledge to spot three men lurking at the corner of the cannery.

I reach for my bow to provide cover fire, and pain sears up my arm.

What the shit? It’s just a papercut with delusions of grandeur. It should not be doing that.

There’s no time to attend to it. Dr. Franklin is about to make the crossing, and down below I see shitheads unslinging assault rifles from their backs. I grit my teeth. Nock, draw -  _ fuck _ . The pin on my sight moves erratically with the tension in my bow arm. Doesn’t matter. I don’t need to perform surgery, I just need to keep their heads down.

I loose five arrows while Dr. Franklin and then Cassie zip across my line. Two find their marks. That still leaves one guy unpunctured, and he takes a few shots at McGinnis on the way over.

I fire three more arrows, cursing under my breath the whole time. The burn has crept from my forearm to my elbow.

“Something wrong?” McGinnis says.

I sling the bow over my shoulder, and I pull back my sleeve and work loose my makeshift bandage. He and Dr. Franklin both lean in for a look.

The edges of the cut are angry red and grotesquely swollen. From wrist to elbow, the veins are running black beneath the skin.

That can’t be good.

I tap off my comm, and I mutter to McGinnis, “I don’t mean to alarm you, but I think that blade was poisoned.”

“Okay,” McGinnis says with forced calm. “We’re going to get that looked at.”

The four of us pass through a deserted office building, whose security system Max has helpfully disabled for us remotely. “Sloppiest thing I’ve ever seen,” she mutters as we pass dim, empty cubicles. “They left a backdoor to their main server through the lightlink.”

By the time we make it to ground level, I’ve got shooting pains all the way to my shoulder, and Cassie is casting me anxious looks every twenty yards.

“Arrow, Orphan,” McGinnis says firmly. “Take Dr. Franklin and head straight for the bikes. Oracle, come meet us at the Belfry.”

Sometime in the past decade, Mr. Wayne retrofitted the bell tower atop the company’s original Victorian-era headquarters smack in the center of Gotham. It’s a state of the art base of operations, which I’m skeptical a sick old man could have achieved on his own. Somebody at Wayne Enterprises knows what’s up.

It’s by far the best place to take the doctor for debrief. There are medical supplies there as well, but probably no stock of antidotes for exotic poisons that turn your blood to sludge.

“Go on ahead,” McGinnis urges us. “I’ll make sure you aren’t followed.”

He does a good job. On the two-block walk from the office building to our little alley, we hear multiple agonized screams from one street over, but we see neither hide nor hair of a bad guy.

In the alley where we stashed the bikes, Sara waits with a little silver two-seater that’s probably lots of fun on winding roads. Cassie chivvies Dr. Franklin into it, and with one last baffled look at the two of us, he closes the door behind him. Force of habit has him buckling his seatbelt, blank-faced and silent, as they glide away.

Cassie looks me over and rubs her left arm just above the wrist, in exactly the place where I was cut.

“I, ah.” My bow arm is damn near useless. “I don’t think I can manage the bike. Can you drive?”

She takes a long look at the wound, and then she swings a leg over. McGinnis catches up just as I’ve gotten settled behind her.

“Hey,” he says quietly, coming to hover at my shoulder. When it comes to looming, hovering, and otherwise being very intensely  _ present _ , he’s one of the best. “How are you doing?”

“The Hood once faced off against a hitman who laced his bullets with a paralytic. If this is curare, I won’t be able to breathe in a few minutes.”

“We’re going to figure it out. Oracle, you think our usual guy can handle this?”

“Honestly, no,” Max says, quiet and tense in my ear. “We’ll have to identify the toxin to do anything about it, and he’s not equipped for that. Whatever it is, it’ll help to slow the Arrow’s heart rate, keep him from moving too much, and keep the injury lower than his heart.”

Cassie shakes her head hard, and she gestures adamantly to McGinnis.

“You’ve got somebody who can handle this?”

Vehement nod.

McGinnis gives me the last word. “You good with it?”

She is almost definitely taking me to ARGUS, which will almost definitely mean owing favors to a woman whom Don Corleone would be nervous owing favors. The other option: my arm turns black and falls off. “I guess I’ll have to be.”

The electric bike whirs quietly to life, and I hold onto her with my good hand. She gently lays the other more snugly across her stomach, and we’re off. Shaking his head, righteously pissed off, McGinnis follows.

She takes us to an innocuous office building downtown that looks much like any other, and the parking garage we spiral into looks even more forgettably standard. She bypasses an empty guard booth, scooting neatly around the yellow arm of the pay-gate, and she takes us to basement level.

In the dimness, we pull up in front of sliding glass doors, and three women in scrubs emerge from the bright hallway just as we come to a stop. Somehow they seem to be expecting us. In the calm, businesslike hurry of seasoned professionals, they hustle me off the bike and into a small but high-tech ICU.

McGinnis tags along close on our heels, asking a dozen questions without giving anyone time to answer. They’re all along the lines of: Where are we? Who are you? What is this?

“Advanced Research Group, United Support,” one woman rattles off quickly. “Our immediate supervisor is Ms. Waller, and if you could please take a step back, we’ll answer your questions soon enough.”

I make it to a room under my own power. It looks like any number of the hospital rooms I’ve ended up in over the years. A gray-haired nurse says, “Take off the hood and jacket, there we go.”

I nearly stop her. I expected to unmask for this, but the instinct runs deep now.

No one seems interested in the face under the hood, nor do they look impressed by the sheer grotesquery of my swollen cut and creepy black veins. Instead they start clipping and sticking monitors to me. The heavyset woman with chestnut hair works an IV into a vein on my good arm. The doctor gives me a quick but thorough examination, asking me for every last detail of how I was injured and the onset of symptoms. I don’t dare lie.

“The active ingredient is almost certainly a neurotoxin,” she says at last, hooking a bag to the IV stand. “They work by paralysis, and the real danger is when it starts to affect your diaphragm and you’re unable to breathe on your own.”

I know what the last few breaths sound like. I held Maria Artigas while she died of strychnine poisoning. I swallow down the rising panic. “What do we do?”

She turns to me and purses her lips. “If we’ve identified it correctly, the antivenom will clear it from your system in about six hours. We’ll know it’s working if your symptoms start to abate in the next hour or two.”

That’s two ifs in as many sentences. “If you’re wrong, then what happens?”

“Standard practice is to maintain life support. We put you on a ventilator and keep your blood oxygenated to prolong our window for alternate treatments.”

“Buy time, hope for a miracle?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Out in the hallway, McGinnis is yelling at someone, but I can’t make out the words.

I’m shivering, and I suspect I have been for a few minutes now. I pull the dark gray blanket tighter around me.

“It’s not time to talk extreme measures yet,” the doctor says kindly. “I’m going to call your friend in here to sit with you.”

Cassie comes to curl up cross-legged on a chair near me. I want to complain that she is at best a recent acquaintance, not my preferred company at the moment. But she looks so genuinely sorry for me that I don't kick her out.

We've gotten shot at together, and I asked her to sit with me at a musical. I guess we're friends now. 

Beneath the skin, the poison burns up my arm. The fingers of my left hand prickle, and when I flex them pain lances through the joints all the way up my hand. I breathe in deep through my nose, and I keep my eyes averted. I don’t want to see the black spidering through my veins.

It’ll start going away in an hour or two. Everything is going to be fine.

McGinnis comes through the door, and he hovers awkwardly at my footboard. Not his best work. I’ve seen stronger hovers from preschool moms.

He shifts his weight over his feet. “Look, no one coats their weapon in poison unless they have an effective antidote on hand. I’m going to go take it from her.”

Even if he can find the bitch, which is probably impossible in the time we’ve got, and even if she has an antidote on her, which she might not by the time he gets to her, it will be like taking candy from a vicious terrorist. “She's pro ball,” I say quietly. “Don't go alone.”

“Cassie,” he says. “You up for it?”

She gets to her feet readily.

In case I don’t get to say it later - “Thank you both.”

Cassie strokes my shoulder, awkward as if she has just been introduced to the class bunny rabbit and instructed to pet it gently.

McGinnis looks me right in the eyes. “Hang tight. We’ll be back soon.”

Then they're gone, and I'm alone in a strange bunker-hospital with a handful of people in scrubs whose names I don’t know. This all happened way too fast. An hour ago, I was kicking in doors and helping the helpless. It was just another mission, not fundamentally different from dozens I’ve run before.

“Roll the dice enough times, and by the law of large numbers eventually they’re going to come up snake eyes,” Dad once told me, late at night and deep in a bottle of scotch. “And it only takes once.”

It suddenly feels urgent to remember the last thing I said to him. We were on the phone just the other day, weren’t we?

I draw a complete blank.

The fingers of my left hand won’t curl, no matter how hard I will them to. My wrist won’t flex, and my arm won’t bend at the elbow. I still have sensation - the texture of the blankets, the burning pain of the cut, the air conditioning on my skin. But my arm feels alien. Part of me but not part of me.

The next hour gives me way too much time to imagine my mother getting bad news tomorrow morning. To hope that Terry and Cassie haven’t done anything stupid, like let a freaky ninja draw blood just to get close to her.

Over the past six years, I’ve come nose to nose with death often enough that we’re kind of buddies now. At least, enough so that I can smartass him. Not once has he challenged me to a staring contest like this. An hour is way too much time.

It’s not nearly enough. I want to claw at each second as it rushes by.

The numbness spreads to my shoulder, and my pulse throbs in my neck.

I fish the comm out of my jacket pocket where it lays over the foot of the bed. “Hey, Max,” I mutter. “Can you get Tish on the line?”

Gentler than she’s ever spoken to me, Max says, “You’ve got it.”

It takes a long time. Cold washes over me in a slow tide. My breath comes fast. Probably symptoms of the poison.

As soon as Tish picks up, I can tell from her voice that Max told her everything. “How are you feeling?”

I release a long breath. “Bored. There’s not even a TV in this room.”

“I’m glad you called.”

“Yeah. I wanted to, um.” Have her handy in case I need to say my goodbyes? No, that’s not the reason. “I just felt like talking.”

“I’ll try to entertain you until Terry gets back with that antidote.”

Coming from her, it doesn’t sound like false hope.

I want a picture in my head. “Where are you?”

“Your bed,” she admits.

“Oh, yeah?” Let’s see if I can get her to laugh. “What are you wearing?”

Yep, there we go. “Your SCU hoodie. It’s the softest thing in the house.”

My SCU hoodie falls to mid-thigh on her, the sleeves hang to her knees, and all that shapeless cotton does nothing for her curves. It’s one of my favorite looks on her. “I like you in my clothes.”

I hear zippers and drawers opening and the rustle of cloth. Sounding a little farther away, Tish says, “I’ll be on the next plane, all right?”

“All gonna be over by the time you get here.” But I won’t tell her no. In her place, I’d need the plane ticket, whether it made a difference or not. “Maybe you’ll catch the stinger after the credits.”

“Are you in pain?” she says, almost as businesslike as the doctor.

“Nah, it’s a paralytic. I lucked out again.”

“Abby’s nearby,” she points out, with a slight echo, and I hear more rummaging. “Has anyone called her?”

“That doesn’t seem like a good idea.” She won’t be allowed into a secure ARGUS facility, but even if Waller came over all sentimental for once, I wouldn’t want Abby here. If I’m dying, my baby sister doesn’t need to watch. If I’m not, she doesn’t need an anxiety attack over nothing.

“What about your parents?”

“Nothing they can do. Let them find out when there’s something to find out.”

Tish stays on the line, sometimes talking and sometimes not. For the next hour, the nurse checks in frequently to frown at the medmonitor and say things that are probably meant to be comforting.

Then the poison digs its claws into my chest.

“You sound like you’re having trouble breathing,” Tish says.

“Yeah, some.” It feels like there’s a pallet of bricks on my chest, and with every passing minute someone stacks on another. “The nice ladies in scrubs have got me covered.”

A few minutes later, the doctor calls it. “All right, it’s time. We’re going to sedate you to intubate.”

Panic jolts through me. I mute my end of the comm.

I don’t want gentle implications; I want a yes or no. “You’re buying time.” I force a shallow breath. “Unless McGinnis comes back with a miracle, I don’t wake up.” Another breath. “Is that right?”

She looks me in the eyes. “Yes, that’s right.” She rolls her lips together thoughtfully and then says, “Is there somebody you want us to call?”

I shake my head. “Already got them. Can you give me a minute?”

“I’m starting the sedative,” she says firmly, tapping the screen of the medmonitor and fiddling around with the IV stand. “You’ll be out very quickly.”

Fuck it, I don’t care what she hears. On the comm, Tish is saying my name - “Are you there? Jon, are you there?” - and her voice is finally starting to crack.

I get a hold of myself before I tap the comm back on. “Sorry, baby. Gonna have to go, okay?”

“Just leave the line open.”

“This part isn’t going to sound good.”

“Please just leave it.”

The room starts to blur and tilt, and I feel another spike of panic. “ Tish, if I don’t see you, um.”  The words won’t come. Even if I had a speech composed, I wouldn’t have the lung capacity for it. “I just love you,” is all I’ve got. “Love you a lot.”

Through the heavy mist descending on me, I’m pretty sure she says it back.

Then there is nothing.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon wakes up, which is surprising. The shadows and threats deepen, which is less surprising.

I wake up, which is pretty surprising. Fluorescent lights glare into my eyes, which is also unusual. They are quickly blocked out by freckles and a gently concerned expression. My voice comes out horribly raspy when I say, “Hey, Cassie.”

I’m in some pain, which is depressingly normal. Cassie gives my shoulder a couple of gentle pats.

I take stock of myself. Experimentally, I lift my left arm. It shakes badly, but it does what I tell it. The relief hits me so hard I gasp, which aggravates my sore throat. My pulse throbs in the cut on my arm, and all in all I feel like a Budweiser Clydesdale kicked me in the chest.

Fuck, yeah, it’s good to be alive.

Cassie smiles tentatively, and she holds up a strawberry popsicle. The clear plastic wrapper is just starting to bead with condensation. She raises her eyebrows inquisitively.

“Give it here.” I struggle up to sitting, and she tucks another pillow behind me. The popsicle feels amazing on my sore throat, and it is only slightly creepy that Cassie watches me finish it. She curls up in the chair with her knees hugged to her chest, pleased with herself for having thought of it.

So what if she’s a little awkward? “I think you probably saved my life.”

She glows as bright as Abby when I say something nice about her singing. That must be why Cassie’s smile weirds me out so much. My sister’s innocence looks plain wrong on a living weapon.

“Terry’s all right?”

Nod, nod.

“My family knows I’m not dead?”

Frown. Head tilt. Wary nod. She’s not entirely sure.

“They’ve been informed,” says a contralto voice from the doorway. “I’m glad to see you awake, Mr. Queen.”

Amanda Waller. I always thought that if I ever met her, I’d be wearing substantially more than my boxers and a sheet.

I’ve seen pictures of the woman who owned Dad’s soul for a year, and damn, she almost looked worth it. Since then the years have not been kind to her. She is more oak than willow now, with the voice and face of a lifelong smoker. Must be stressful, being a living caricature from a conspiracy theorist’s fevered imagination. She is meticulously dressed in a gray pantsuit, and her hair is pulled back severely.

Next to me, Cassie’s expression has gone completely blank.

“Orphan Four and the Batman succeeded in retrieving the antidote,” Waller says, with all the enthusiasm of NPR announcing the Dow Jones industrial average. “You’ll experience some weakness and nausea over the next week or two, but you’ll make a full recovery.”

Poisoned nearly to death, and I’m going to walk it off. Suck on that, neurotoxin. 

“They brought in the woman who poisoned you. She’s in our custody for debrief.”

Debrief. I know what that means.

The winter after Risdon, Dad and I discussed the wisdom of something like SERE training. He was happy to help with the survival, evasion, and escape portions. For months I spent every other weekend running around in the woods learning to slip common restraints, make a Dakota smokeless fire pit, and use shadow and environmental noise to my advantage. Dad was in his element, and we had a fantastic time.

For interrogation resistance training, he called in Sara. She and an associate grabbed me off a dark street in the middle of my evening run.

Her co-conspirator was a plain, bald man of middle height and middle age, with a Midwestern accent of no particular inflection. I remember his bloused khaki pants, and his gray T-shirt, but I cannot for the life of me recall the contours of his face.

“I’m not going to do anything as unsophisticated as hurt you,” he said when they first shoved me into a cinderblock room and yanked the bag off my head. “Not at first.”

Instead he used sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and a bizarre recording of a Rudyard Kipling poem on repeat. You’d be surprised how quickly sensory fuckery can wear you down without anyone so much as brandishing a thumbscrew at you. Somewhere in my fiftieth consecutive hour awake, the idea that this was an exercise kind of slipped my grip. I sat across from a blank-faced stranger, cuffed to a metal table, staring at the grated drain in the middle of the concrete floor and wondering what it was for. In between his questions I started falling into microsleeps.

Then he hurt me. Given the state I was in by then, he didn’t even have to do it very much. I don’t like thinking about the way that weekend ended.

“Where did you get Captain Fun?” I asked Sara afterward, wrapped in blankets on the cot in the lair.

“Work friend,” she said, cracking open another bottle of Gatorade. She pressed it into my hands and said, in her gentlest voice, “Come on, let’s get your blood sugar and everything back to normal.”

It was what I did for Tish, after putting her through something intense: wrap her up, get some water or carbs in her. I nearly told Sara, “A+ aftercare.” Luckily what I actually said was, “So that was about as humiliating as I expected. Thanks.”

She reached over to pet my hair. “You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about.”

I learned later that Dad had been monitoring the proceedings from out of sight the whole time. He’s a weird guy. There aren’t many dads who will stand by while their kid goes slightly nuts from enhanced interrogation techniques and vomit-sobs on a concrete floor.

“When I worked for Waller,” he said, when he had taken Sara’s place on the edge of the cot, “they put us through the same things. They thought it was important for us to truly understand the effects of our techniques.”

“You were a…” What’s the accepted industry term for a torturer? “You were an interrogator?”

He looked me in the eyes, as he always does when he’s telling me things he’d rather not. “That was among my roles, yes.”

Mom once told me that when Dad’s nightmares are bad enough to wake her too, he is usually not reliving the nights when he got the massive burn scar on his back, the sprawling amateur tattoo on his shoulder, or the keloids ripping across his torso. “It’s the things he did to other people. That’s what he can’t shake.”

As the Arrow, I hurt people for answers all the time. I dangle them from overpasses and punch them while they’re restrained. Just recently I ripped holes in two men’s hands, some of the most delicate bone structures and nerve-rich flesh in the human body. That wasn’t even for answers. That was because I wanted to.

But terrorizing people who are completely in your power is an art, and I work in crayon compared to the masters.

I know what kind of operation Waller is running. I’d rather nothing owed between me and the professional brain-breaker.

So when Waller says, “You are welcome to access the transcripts or video logs of whatever information we obtain, in exchange, of course, for the equivalent courtesy from your end of the investigation.”

I say, “Nah.”

She narrows her eyes at me, and all of a sudden I remember about the Predator drones.

I swallow hard. There’s a lot of phlegm sliding down my raw throat. “No, thank you. I appreciate the offer, but I think we’ll make do on our own.”

She makes an indistinct noise of displeasure. “You and your mother and Miss Cuvier?”

“Tish works for Panoptic, not the Arrow.”

Waller gives me a thin smile, and she gets to her feet. “I’ve wanted to meet you for quite some time, Mr. Queen. You were exactly what I expected.”

I lift my chin and try to look rakish. “Tall?”

She looks me over, in all my bruised, bandaged, shirtless glory. Then she heads for the door, and over her shoulder she says, with a sneer, “Heroic.”

When the door closes behind her, Cassie relaxes.

I frown at her, and for a moment I see her as Amanda Waller must. Physical prodigy, living weapon, valuable asset. All this in the form of an illiterate kid barely out of her teens, who has no one in the world except the lady who killed her abusive father. Plus she is the next best thing to voiceless. Not only can she not talk back, but she’d have a hell of a time going to the press or to anyone else.

What the hell is wrong with Sara Lance, that she tangled Cassie up in this?

I lean in, hold up my empty red-stained stick, and give her a conspiratorial look. “Are there more where this came from?”

The teasing tone passes her right by. She gives me a perfectly serious nod.

“Okay. Bring two this time.”

She finishes hers in record time, but I start drifting off again halfway through mine. The last thing I remember is her taking it away before it can melt on me.

Yep. Heroic.

 

The next time I wake up, I’m alone.

The first thing I do is vomit up frothy red popsicle into a pan left conveniently nearby. When I’ve caught my breath again and gotten my shakes under control, I take stock. There’s nothing hooked up to me except a pulse oximeter, and a quick glance under the covers reveals that someone has dressed me in scrub pants. The hall beyond is quiet, and no one responds to the “come check on me” button.

Cursing, I make my wobbly way to the hall, where I find a nurse asleep at the desk. I’m all set to wake her up and demand painkillers. Then I realize I’m in a super secret ARGUS facility unsupervised _._ I can’t waste an opportunity to poke around.

Slowly, with frequent stops to lean against the wall and shake, I make it down the hall. It’s room after empty room identical to mine, all the way to the T-intersection. To the left are swinging doors that might lead to surgery. To the right, more rooms - and the sound of a television.

I follow the sound to the very last room on the right.

The scene is familiar from my visits to Captain Lance in his last days. A thin, wasted man is propped up on carefully arranged pillows, breathing slow and labored. Blue veins show through his papery skin. High in the corner, the _Magnificent Seven_ movie from a couple years back blares on the TV.

The man catches me looking, and the sudden interest on his face brings him to life. He squints at me, and then he smiles. “You’re the Queen boy,” he says in an accent I can’t place.

My knees are wobbling again, so I grab the door jamb for support. “And you are?”

He gestures at the chair next to his bed. “Sit down before you fall down.”

I stumble the few feet, and I sit.

“You look just like her,” the old man says thoughtfully, and I decide he sounds Australian. “Her eyes, her nose - most of your face is hers.”

My resemblance to Mom is a fairly standard observation from old friends of my parents. Perhaps this is an Arrowing buddy from back in the day.

“But that’s Oliver’s chin,” the old man says decisively, regarding me with amusement. “I’ll bet you’re a stubborn son of a bitch too, aren’t you?”

I’m panting too hard to pull off indignation. I settle for, “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Slade Wilson,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jonathan.”

I sit up straight in my chair. I’ve seen photos of Slade Wilson as he was in 2014, crazed on mirakuru and attempting to raze the city. That man was built like an M1 Abrams. It’s hard to believe that the wasted, hollow-cheeked figure in front of me is even the same species.

“What are you doing here?”

“Dying.”

I swallow back rising nausea. “You could do it more politely.”

“I might have, if the first bout of pneumonia had gotten me,” he says, sinking back into his pillows. “It’s the second that’s trying my patience. They told me the mirakuru and its cure would take a few years off my life. It would have been less hassle to take a few more.”

“Shame Dad didn’t kill you on that rooftop and save you all this aggravation.”

He chuckles, and it rasps. “Tell me, is he still deluding himself that it was mercy to leave me alive?”

“I don’t get the impression he thinks about you very often.”

His smile fades. “Would you pass along a message for me?”

I see no reason to play errand boy for the man who murdered my grandmother. I cross my arms at him.

“Tell him or don’t,” Wilson says, unfazed. “Tell him he was right.”

The guy knows how to bait a hook. Now he’s got me curious. “Right about what?”

“He’ll know.”

“What are you doing in here?” says a voice from the doorway. The nurse looks both alarmed and annoyed, and she’s still got the pattern of her sweater sleeve imprinted on her cheek. “Come on, back to your room.”

Dutifully I go with her, and about halfway I have to stop and lean against the wall.

“Here,” she says irritably, pulling my arm over her shoulder.

“You don’t want to - “

She buckles and lets me fall against the wall again. “God, you’re heavy.”

“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”

She glances fretfully up and down the hall while I catch my breath.

“Is he not allowed to have visitors?” I ask her. “You look like you’re going to be in trouble for it.”

Her only answer is to put her hands on her hips and purse her lips.

“Fine. Can I have painkillers?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

She herds me the rest of the way to bed, where she feeds me pills. Not two minutes later, I’m drifting in dreamland.

 

The next time I wake, Mom is sitting nearby, and the scenery has changed substantially. I’m in a big fluffy queen bed in a light, airy room with high ceilings and graceful curtains. It looks vaguely familiar.

“Oh, there you are,” Mom says from the settee by the window, setting her glassbook aside with a smile. “You sure took your time waking up. I understand sleeping in on a Sunday, but two p.m. starts looking kind of debauched.”

“It’s Sunday?”

“Yeah. You were out for a while. It’s a good thing, it means your body’s been repairing itself.”

“I hear I’m going to be basically fine.”

“Yeah.” Then her eyes fill with tears. I hate this part, when Mom cries. “You scared us really bad this time.”

I guess I did. I’ve never said my goodbyes before. “I might have been briefly concerned myself for a minute there. Is this Wayne’s house?”

She smooths her hands down her skirt. “You’re in the Regency room, yes. Dad and Abby are making breakfast downstairs. Do you think you could eat?”

“Food sounds disgusting. But I probably should.” I clear my throat. Phlegm rattles loose and slimes down, I swallow hard on a wave of nausea. “Is Tish here?”

Pretty much since I met Tish, Mom has been giving me knowing smiles, but this is the first time there has been something sad mixed into it. “She’s in the shower. I’m sure she’ll come check on you when she’s out.” She bites her lip, and then she adds, from somewhere in the neighborhood of an accusation, “You didn’t call us.”

“All you could’ve done was freak out. No point in putting you through that.”

“I’m your mother,” she says in a low voice I don’t often hear. “Didn’t you think I’d want to know, regardless?”

I admit I wasn’t thinking very hard about what my mother would want while my body shut down and my lungs stopped working. “You found out soon enough.”

She sighs in frustration, but she drops it. “I’ll let you get dressed.”

Instead I fall into another doze. The next time I wake, Tish is crawling across the bed, a little awkwardly in a dress, with her hair all wet and fragrant.

Last time we spoke, I was pretty sure I’d never see her again. I hold out my arm to her, and wordlessly she curls up next to me with her head on my shoulder. She strokes my T-shirt, and I press my mouth to her hairline.

“How do you feel?” she murmurs.

Usually my first instinct when she needs reassurance is to make her laugh, but something tells me that’s not what she needs right now. I turn onto my side and bundle her closer to my chest. “Kind of hungover, but it’ll pass. Are you okay?”

She nods, but she is holding her breath. I rub her back, because sometimes that helps. When it doesn’t - “Baby, take a breath.”

She does, and then she starts crying. I suspect she’s been holding back since she first answered the phone for Max. For a few minutes, she presses her face into my shoulder and shakes faintly. Tears and snot soak through my shirt, and I slide my fingers under her hair to massage her neck.

When she’s calmer, she says between hitching breaths, “I can’t handle many more phone calls like that.”

“You know, I said let’s not tell my parents because there’s no point in putting them through that, but I went ahead and put you through the wringer.” For no other reason than that I wanted to hear her voice. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“Any wringer you're in,” she says sternly, “I'm coming too. End of story.”

There's a shock of recognition, which makes no sense. I’ve never heard that arrangement of words before in my life. But they hit me so hard, my brain stalls out.

“Dr. Franklin is still at the safehouse downtown, and Cassie has been looking after him. It sounds like his captors wanted exactly what we thought - to weaponize his research. He needed some recovery time before a full debrief. Team Bat is calling a meeting this afternoon to see what he knows.”

I'm still several sentences back, where I'm pretty sure she just said, “Where thou goest.”

“Do you want in?” she prompts.

“Sorry, what?”

“Do you want to be there for debrief with Dr. Franklin?”

“Yeah, if I can get a ride downtown.”

“I don’t like this case,” she says quietly. “It’s all too close to my father’s work for comfort. It’s everything Vitruvius has been afraid of.”

I’m too tired to be afraid right now. “We’re going to figure it out. Are there pancakes?”

“Your dad’s downstairs,” she says, and kisses my nose. “There are lots of pancakes.”

When we make it down to the kitchen, Dad sits at the island with his glassbook open and a crumby, sticky plate next to him. A big glass bowl of batter stands next to the Viking range, where a skillet still waits. He looks up and gives me not-quite-a-smile. I didn’t die and ruin everything, but I also didn’t make his life easy for the past forty-eight hours.

“Blueberries in yours?” he says, getting to his feet.

Letting him hug me is easier than talking about how I almost died, so I come around the kitchen island to stand next to him. “Yeah. If I throw it up later, I want some pretty colors.”

He puts an arm around my shoulder and gives me a slightly awkward sideways squeeze. Then he nudges me toward the stool on the other side of the island, and he turns on a burner. “Sit. This will be ready in a minute.”

I sit, and I watch him pour batter. As it bubbles, I clear my throat. “So I met Slade Wilson.”

Dad doesn’t react. In fact, he doesn’t react so hard that I know I’ve shocked him.

“He was in ARGUS’ secure med center the same time I was. Prognosis isn’t good.”

“I’d heard his health was failing,” Dad says, stilted.

“He asked me to tell you that you were right. Do you know what he meant by that?”

He looks at me, and there is a kind of unutterable sadness in his expression. “Yes, I think I do.”

I wait. He flips a pancake. I keep waiting.

“Go on into the living room,” he tells me in lieu of explanation. “I’ll bring you a plate when they’re ready.”

We’re in the section of the house I think of as the bachelor pad, where McGinnis has set up camp. The furniture here is not the silk-upholstered antiques of Wayne’s front parlor. Abby is curled up asleep on the longest, deepest, squishiest sofa I’ve ever seen; Percy is keeping her feet warm. A few feet away, McGinnis is asleep on the matching loveseat, sock feet propped up on the sofa arm and glassbook still resting on his chest.

On his padded bed in the corner, Ace raises his head, determines that I am not Wayne, and droops back down again.

“This seems backward,” I mutter to Tish, gesturing at Abby and Terry. “She’s got room to spare. He doesn’t fit.”

“I didn’t make the arrangements.”

I take a seat next to Percy, for which he is pathetically grateful. I let him lick my hand, and I give him a perfunctory pat.

Tish goes over to McGinnis and wakes him up in the same careful way she woke me for two weeks after that Vertigo overdose. She doesn’t touch him; she quietly repeats his name until he blinks awake. “Hey. Jon’s up. Should I call Max about that debrief?”

He gives us a disoriented frown, and then he clears his throat and says, “Yeah, okay.” He sniffs, sets aside the glassbook, and turns onto his side with his arms crossed comfortably. “We’ll have to talk to Franklin in uniform,” he says to me. “Your hood and jacket are in the closet in your room.”

Every time I nearly die, my family wobbles on that balance beam between supportive and “Why the fuck do we let you do this?' Thank God at least one person in this house is prepared to pretend that nothing unusual happened in the past two days. 

Tish comes to sit on the floor and lean against my legs. The dog is pushing his head into my hands, and I pet him dutifully. His happy wiggling wakes Abby, which puts an end to case talk. She wants to squish in next to me and sit under my arm, which I guess is fine. I put my family through some shit; I can let them cuddle me. It’s not like I have an allergy.

Ousted from the sofa, Percy wags over hopefully to Ace’s bed in the corner, and a few feet away he slides down into a puppy bow. Ace barely twitches an ear.

“Get up, fuzzball,” McGinnis advises Percy. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Instead Percy flattens himself to the floor and army-crawls another few inches.

Ace growls at him.

“Don’t you dare show your teeth,” Abby says sharply. “Percy, baby, come over here by me.”

“He’s Wayne’s dog,” McGinnis says, semi-apologetically, watching Percy trot back to Abby with his ears laid back obsequiously. “It kind of shows.”

Dad shows up with pancakes, and he glances between me and McGinnis. Then he very tactfully snags Abby and scoots her right out of the room on some made-up errand. The dog trails along behind his two favorite people.

Thank yous are in order, and just in case McGinnis and I are about to have a moment, I pat Tish’s knee. She gives us the room too. McGinnis watches her go with vague disapproval. 

I’ll jump right into what I need to say here, as sincerely as I can: “Thank you for pulling that off with the antidote.”

McGinnis pushes his way up to sitting. “Welcome. Now quit getting poisoned. It makes your sister hyperventilate.”

No moment, then. “It’s not much fun for me either. How’d you track her down?”

“Roulette,” he admits. “I took a wild guess on the list of leads we’d compiled for Dr. Franklin’s location. One looked like it might be some kind of safe house type deal. We lucked out, and there she was.” Troubled, he adds, “She wasn’t alone.”

“More of those shitheads we met at the cannery?”

“No. Just one man.”

It’s a rare lone dude who can make Terry McGinnis sound so serious. “He got away?”

He shifts in his seat. “The woman was our priority. I wanted her alive, in case we needed to know more about the poison.”

“Waller plans to get a hell of a lot more than that out of her,” I say darkly.

He bristles. “ARGUS’ help was conditional. You get that, right?”

I wince. “I’m not judging. Ideas on who she is?”

“I took off her veil. Underneath it, her face is mostly burn scars.”

“Great. Tragic backstory.”

“One day we’ll fight someone from a good home whose most traumatic life event was not getting into Yale. Today is not that day.” He waves at my plate. “Get some calories in you.”

Half an hour later, we leave for downtown HQ, McGinnis carrying our gear slung over his shoulder. In the vast garage, he leads me to the least flashy of Wayne’s cars, which was explicitly left to him.

“One other thing happened while you were out,” he says as we pull down the drive. “The last few legal knots over Mr. Wayne’s estate finally got untangled. Turns out the manor goes to Tim and Stephanie Drake.”

“Shit. What happens when they figure out there’s a basement?”

He gives me a very patient look. “You know the old man basically raised them, don’t you? They know there’s a basement. I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

I blink a couple of times. Then I drastically revise my memory of the afternoon Tim Drake pulled right into traffic and collided with a car full of kidnappers. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

The Batman’s downtown headquarters occupy what was once the tallest building for miles, the original Wayne Tower. Now it is dwarfed by high rises, and what’s left to it is dignity rather than grandeur. Nearly the entire top forty feet are mirrored glass, reflecting the streetlights and passing L trains.

We suit up at ground level, voice changers on. I pull up the hood, and beside me, McGinnis pulls the cowl down over his eyes.

The elevator doors open onto a sleeker, higher-tech version of the cave beneath the manor. Ringing the old belfry are banks of computers, rows of hanging weaponry and gear, and a few panels of wires whose function I can’t begin to guess at. Over it all hangs the original brass bell, stamped with the date 1832.

In a rolling chair near the great wall of windows, Max swivels around and nods at us.

I sometimes forget that her pink hair is not the limit of her weird aesthetic. She has shown up to this meeting in an actual black lacy widow’s veil, which, granted, is not the stupidest thing I’ve seen her wear. But it sure makes this gathering look way more like Halloween than I’d like.

Dr. Franklin has lost the twitchy prey look, and he is sitting calmly with his hands folded in his lap.

“You’re all right?” is the first thing he says to me. He gestures to Max. “She told me you were in critical condition.”

You told him that? Damn it, Max. No one who hasn’t seen my face is supposed to know that I’m human under all this leather. “I’ll be fine. You’re looking better than the last time I saw you.”

“It’s amazing what a few good meals and a proper shower can do.”

“I guess you know why we’re here.”

“You want to know what I know about my captors.” He takes a deep breath. “As I’ve told, ah,” he glances at Max, “Oracle, they wanted me to fabricate a vaccine using a recombinant protein derived from an unspecified pathogen. Their understanding of the science was… limited, and what they were asking was impossible with the materials they provided. Of course, they didn’t believe that when I explained.”

“Which pathogen?”

“There was really no way to tell based on the protein alone. It was like asking me to back-engineer bulletproof glass with only the bullet to go on.”

“So none of them was valedictorian of Terrorist U. What do you remember about them specifically? How they dressed, how they talked, what they called each other - anything.”

“They spoke a language I didn’t recognize. It might have been Russian, but I’m monolingual myself and really have no idea. I paid close attention, and I tried very hard to remember anything that might be important, but they didn’t say more than they had to in my presence, and they were careful never to call each other by name.”

“Who did you have the most contact with?”

“The veiled woman. I never saw more than her eyes. Her English was excellent, but archaic, like she learned it reading Emily Bronte. She seemed to be in charge, but she might have just been the best English speaker or the one with the best grasp of virology, limited as it was.”

Max leans toward him. “Did they seem to be on a timeline of any kind?”

“She kept telling me, ‘We have all the time in the world, doctor.’ As if eventually I’d do what she was asking, so there was no point in stalling. It could have just been an intimidation tactic, but they didn’t actually do very much to rush me.”

We go over the rest of his captivity in detail, but ultimately he doesn’t have much more to offer us. By the time he’s done talking, my head is killing me, and all three of them are casting me the occasional concerned glance.

“Thank you for everything,” Max tells Dr. Franklin at last. “I’ll take you home, if you’re ready.”

For having done nearly nothing, I’m exhausted, and the walk to the car leaves me shaky. McGinnis politely doesn’t ask any questions. He just drives and waits for me to catch my breath.

“This is better news than we thought,” I point out when I can.

“Yes,” he says thoughtfully. “Mysterious terrorists with lots of manpower want a bioweapon for reasons we can’t pin down. That’s great news.”

“They have no idea how. They had to steal a scientist, and they didn’t even use him right, which means they are a long, long way from moving on this. At this pace they may never get their weapon.”

“Then why did that equipment go missing?”

“I bet they’ve already broken it.”

Back at Wayne Manor, we come in by way of the cave to put our gear away. The lights are already on, visible at the end of the tunnel. We exchange a glance, and McGinnis strides ahead of me into the cave.

My parents and the Drakes are all standing around the sprawling computer console, chatting amiably.

Stephanie Drake smiles her veneered smile at me. “I’m so glad to hear you’re recovering well, Jonny.”

I’m too surprised to answer.

McGinnis doesn’t seem nearly as shocked to see them, but he is plenty pissed off. “What is this?”

Tim Drake leans calmly against the med table, arms crossed, and looks to Dad.

“The Drakes are here to offer their help,” Dad says.

“Maybe it was a little rude to barge in,” Mom concedes. “But this seemed like the best place to talk cowls and capes. Abby and Tish are upstairs, and I think you want to keep this between as few people as possible.”

“They’re here?” Mrs. Drake says with another megawatt smile. “Oh, I’ll have to go say hi.”

Dad clears his throat and addresses himself to Terry. “You’ve been working shorthanded for almost a year now, since long before Bruce passed. It’s more work for Max, and it’s more dangerous for you.”

McGinnis draws himself up. “We’ve been doing just fine.”

“I declined this gig years ago, if you remember,” Tim says with equanimity. “If you don’t want me here, I’m perfectly content to go back to my own lab. But you’ve been working with less manpower than the old man ever did in his prime.”

McGinnis shifts his weight onto his back foot and stands scowling at them.

Stephanie Drake gestures to the carefully preserved uniforms at the back of the cave. “There was a time when he had the two of us, and Dick, _and_ Barbara all suiting up with him, plus Alfred here at home. When have you ever had a five-man team in the field?”

I’ve heard Mom's stories about the female Robin. This woman once took out six of the Lucky Hand Triad who had taken a police precinct hostage with my mother caught inside. “There were teeth on the floor when she was done,” Mom said. “I think I might have stepped on one. It sort of crunched.”

And then the Drakes made it out, just like my parents did. They didn’t throw their whole lives on the pyre. They’re peacefully retired, and they’re not going to die alone in a big empty house except for a mean dog and a surrogate son who barely understands them.

Terry needs somebody’s voice in his head. Between these two and the obsessive recluse who used to run mission control down here, I know who I prefer.

“It’s not a question of your competence,” Mr. Drake says levelly. “There’s also the matter of finances and technical expertise. The Batman’s toys don’t come cheap, and it all gets laundered through Wayne Enterprises. Bruce delegated that part to me years ago. I’ve been keeping you equipped for some time now, and I’d like to go on doing it more conveniently.”

It sounds calculated to help McGinnis save face, but it also sounds like the truth.

Mrs. Drake glances between McGinnis and her husband, and then she smiles. “Well, you think about it. I’m going to go upstairs and say hello to the girls. Felicity?”

Mom screws on a smile and follows her to the stairs. I turn to trail along behind them, but McGinnis catches my eye. I think that look means, Please don’t leave me alone with your dad _and_ Drake.

So I take a seat on the bottom step.

“I thought you were done,” McGinnis says to Drake. “The old man made it sound pretty definitive.”

Drake and Dad exchange glances. “Hmm. Bruce making extreme black and white statements.”

Dad smiles fondly. “Imagine that.”

McGinnis looks at the floor. “You knew him better than I did. And he, ah, didn’t really leave any instructions.” He looks Drake in the eyes. “We have been kind of shorthanded.”

“None of us does this alone,” Dad says. It’s a familiar refrain. “At least, not well.”

“You could have just talked to me about it,” McGinnis grumbles. “You didn’t have to ambush me.”

“Who are you talking to?” I say from down here on the step. “It’s all vigilantes down here. Ambush is how we start friendly conversations.”

Drake smiles. “Would you have taken me up on it, if I’d made a polite phone call?”

“Honestly, no.”

“Have you considered the possibility,” Dad says slowly, “that Bruce left no instructions because he believed you didn’t need them?”

Terry just looks back at him. Then he swallows hard.

God damn it. I said the exact same thing last week, and he brushed me off. But when Dad says it - when Dad _intones_ it in his best mayoral voice - then it’s the wisdom of the ages, and the dumb bastard chokes up on the spot.

“Going forward, Steph and I will be right upstairs when you need us,” Drake says. “I don’t expect we’ll be suiting up again, but we’re happy to give any other kind of help.”

I glance back at the leathers he once wore, sealed behind glass and bathed in soft yellowish light.

McGinnis holds out his hand. “I appreciate it.”

They shake. Thank fuck, someone’s going to be looking out for him when we go home.

Upstairs, we find everyone else comfortable in the living room. Abby is down on the floor with Percy, brushing out the long feathery hair at the backs of his legs, and Stephanie Drake is on his other side, gently rubbing his ears. They are chatting away happily about the Broadway revival of _Hamilton_.

When my parents go to the kitchen to make late-night chamomile for everyone, I follow.

When I have them alone, I mutter, “Seriously, though, you ambushed him?”

“You know he hasn’t been doing well,” Mom says. “That control freak perfectionism? Classic vigilante failure mode.”

Can’t argue with that. My parents know better than anyone what burnout looks like in this line of work.

“He’s trying very hard to be Bruce,” Dad says quietly, “which even Bruce wasn’t good at over long stretches of time. Especially not when his support system was pulled out from under him.”

I sigh. “Yeah, yeah, you guys know best. But you realize we’re closer to thirty than twenty. You can just talk to us. Like we’re grownups. ‘Cause we are.”

They trade a look that isn’t quite guilty.

“Never mind.” My next is aimed mostly at Dad: “You’d do the same thing to Dig or somebody, if you thought they needed it.”

Mom holds out a steaming mug to me. “You want honey in yours?”

I try not to sound petulant when I say, “I didn’t ask for tea.”

“No, but,” she brings it closer and closer to me, “do you want honey?”

I take the tea. I jerk my head at the canister on the counter. “Sugar. One cube.”

She laughs and plops one in. Then she tips her head at me and offers a rueful smile. “I shouldn’t have fussed at you for not calling.” The next bit obviously costs her something: “You were having about the worst possible night, and you must have been scared. Whatever you needed to do to get through it, whoever you needed to call, that’s okay with me.”

I don’t know what to say, so I set aside my tea and give her a hug. Can’t go wrong hugging Mom, as Dad’s nod confirms when I glance at him.

“It’s going to take some getting used to, that’s all,” she says into my shoulder.

“What will?”

She rubs my back, and she gives me one more squeeze and releases me with a smile. “You’re not going to run to me first anymore.”

It’s not just that I didn’t call her. It’s that I called Tish instead.

This, too, Dad’s expression confirms. It also radiates mild pity that I’m only just now figuring it out.

I clear my throat and reach for my chamomile. “I wasn’t trying to make some big statement or anything.”

“Come on,” she says, leading the way back to the living room. On her way out, she nods to a mug on the counter. “And bring Abby’s tea with you.”

 

For three days, I spend most of my time asleep. I sleep on the couch, I sleep in the armchair, I sleep on the loveseat. “It’s like having a really big housecat,” Abby observes. My family is on constant rotation, so that every time I wake up, someone different is in the room.

“Why am I getting babysat?” I ask McGinnis when the roster reaches him. “Are you guys expecting a relapse?”

He scratches the back of his head. “It was a battle to get you released from ARGUS. The doctor insisted we monitor your condition. We promised we’d take you back if you had a seizure.”

That wakes me up. “Is that likely?”

“No, but it would suck enough that we’re being careful. Look, I’m taking this shift because I have intel. The woman who poisoned you calls herself Adhara. An expert at ARGUS says the name is from the old Assassin tradition.”

An expert at ARGUS? Thank you, Sara. “She can’t be one of them. There were only three left, and they’re all accounted for.” Nyssa and Sara have no interest in perpetuating Ra’s al Ghul’s legacy. The only other survivor is Ilinca Nicolescu, the Scorpion’s Tail. She is still in ARGUS custody, where I’m told boredom has quieted her ragey death threats. She amuses herself with extensive reading, teaching the other inmates Romanian, and the occasional suicide attempt.

“No, this woman is about twenty years too young for the League,” McGinnis says. “Our source says she’s a copycat.”

“Which star is she?”

“It’s a really bright one in Canis Major. The old Latin name for it was,” he consults his phone, “Prima Virginum.”

I can think of a few reasons why a woman who survived an acid attack might become a ruthless bringer of death who calls herself First of the Virgins. Most of them are sympathetic enough to make me uneasy about whatever Waller is doing to her right this moment. 

“No word yet on her birth name,” McGinnis says. “As for who she’s working for - all she’ll say is that she is well-compensated for her silence.”

“A mercenary?” That doesn’t fit at all.

“Yeah, she must have realized she can charge a premium if she name-drops the League.”

“Definitely a mercenary? She seems more like the true believer type.”

“Definitely. Which means these people are way better funded than we thought.” He sighs. “Waller will wait her out. Whatever Adhara was getting paid, no one can afford indefinite silence.”

Waller knows what she’s doing. The answers will come. 

“She might not share them with you,” Dad reminds me after dinner. “ARGUS doesn’t give away intel for free.”

“I already told her I’m not interested in any more favors.”

“Good,” he says soberly. “We’re already in the red.”

That night I wake up on the sofa at two a.m. from a familiar nightmare of drowning. Four years later, and I’m still having that one. For a moment I can’t spot my current babysitter. Then I hear voices nearby.

“It’s 2046, for God’s sake,” McGinnis is saying, one room over in the kitchen. “There’s no reason to just… _obey_ him.”

“I don’t,” Tish’s voice replies, slightly defensive. “I trust him.”

“You do.” He half laughs. “The other day he sent you out of the room with just a look. He is definitely not any smarter than you, so why do you listen to him?”

There is a long, uncomfortable silence, which I have no desire to step into. I keep still. 

“When he got dosed with Vertigo,” she says at last, “and he thought you were Joseph Risdon, he walked toward you. He was out of his mind on panic-inducing hallucinogens, and he walked toward you.”

McGinnis sounds mildly confused by this segue. “To keep me away from you and Abby. I remember.” 

In my head, that is a story about how I let a jumped-up drug dealer slip one past me, failed to notice I’d been dosed, then tried to kill my best friend. It all ended in a humiliating meltdown on the kitchen floor.

It sounds different when they tell it.

“When we hear a strange noise at night,” Tish goes on, “he goes to see. When someone shoots at us or something explodes, he jumps on top of me. He puts my safety before his, and I let him.”

Of course she lets me. Every time she tried not to, I was a huge pain in the ass about it.

“It’s his skin,” she says. “It might be mine too, but it’ll be his first.”

“So it’s his call?” McGinnis says skeptically.

“I trust him,” she repeats. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

The kettle whistles on the stove, and mugs clink on the counter. It’s safe to get up now and shuffle into the kitchen, where hopefully I’ll find carbs. 

“Sorry, did we wake you?” Tish says. 

“Your tea screamed. Of course it woke me.”

The three of us eat a sleeve of butter cookies, and we don’t talk about whose skin means whose call. I don’t really know where to file that idea away yet.

My parents, Tish, and I book our flights home as soon as I can tolerate the five hour trip. The night before we leave, I go down to the cave to clean my gear and seal it up tight for next time.

McGinnis is already down there, working on a set of parallel bars. I’ve never incorporated much in the way of artistic gymnastics into my training, but he takes it pretty seriously. He gives me a nod of acknowledgment, and then he rises into an L-sit.

Across the room, Tim Drake is just finishing upgrading the computer system. “Max has kept everything in good order,” he makes sure to say. “I’m just setting up easy access from my own devices.”

Terry drops down gracefully onto the mats. “Okay, cool.” He stands for a moment trying to think of what else to say, and then sinks into a stretch.

Drake smiles at me, and he offers me a handshake. “I’m going to call it a night. It’s been good to see you, Jon.”

“Yeah, it’s been nice to actually meet you.”

“Terry?” he calls across the cave. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Ten o’clock,” Terry calls back, offering a wave goodbye that looks more like a weird salute.

I take my time with my gear, disassembling the bow and unlacing the uniform into its component pieces to clean them all very thoroughly. McGinnis hits the showers in the meantime, and he comes out just as I’m reassembling everything. Even this mild exertion has me in a cold sweat with shaking hands. Wordlessly he comes over and takes it right out of my hands to finish himself.

“If you’re going to work with Drake,” I say when I feel less nauseated, “you should probably figure out how to actually talk to him without…” I mimic the weird salute. “Whatever that was.”

I was prepared for a glare, but instead he chuckles. “Yeah, probably. It’s not like he’s a taciturn old recluse. By comparison, this should be easy.”

I hazard an observation: “He does remind me of the old man, though.”

“Analytical. Methodical. Detail-obsessed.” McGinnis replaces my gear in its glass case, then tugs on a sleeve to straighten it. “Gordon says he’s basically who Wayne would have been, if he’d been well-adjusted enough to actually make it out of the life at some point.”

“That’s how we’re measuring adjustment now?”

He gives me the same irritable shrug that I’ve seen when we steered too close to the subject of Dana. He seals the case airtight, and quietly he says, “Hell if I know.”

I didn’t mean anything by the question, but I’ve hit a nerve. It’s no secret that he thinks I’ve had it easy in some ways. Mom and Dad have always been right there, laying out the path.

I nod upstairs, where there are no less than four people who used to commit criminal vigilantism pretty much nightly, and who now lead fairly nice lives as upstanding members of society. They have kids and wine collections. “They might have a pretty good idea.”

He makes a noncommittal noise. We shut the cave down for the night.

 

The morning we leave Wayne Manor for the airport, Abby gets out of bed at four-thirty to say her goodbyes.

“Coffee, junebug?” Dad says from the counter, where he is combed, crisply dressed, and annoyingly alert with a travel mug in his hands.

She shakes her head, shuffling over in pajamas and sock feet, and she slumps with her forehead on his chest. “I’m not awake. It’s just hugs. Then right back to bed.”

Dad smiles down at the top of her head, and he pats her back gently. “Thank you. You didn’t have to get up.”

“I know.” She shambles over to do the same exact thing to me. “I’m a sweetheart.”

Mom sleepwalks to the cab, and on the plane she carefully arranges her neck pillow and noise-canceling headphones, tips her head back, and immediately drops off. Tish lets me doze slumped against her for most of our five hours in the air, and she walks off the plane rolling and stretching her shoulder. “I love you,” she murmurs at baggage claim, “but that’s the last time we do it that way.”

A couple hours later at Panoptic, I make no attempt to explain the fact that I look like death warmed over. The staff will fill in the blanks with whatever they personally consider plausible.

Ramirez sets aside her phone as I pass, and she makes a cross with two fingers to ward me off. “Whatever you caught in the airport petri dish, I don’t want it.”

“Too late,” I shoot back. “I licked your touchscreen.”

She rolls her eyes, but she also reaches for the hand sanitizer. “I can’t believe you’re in charge of people,” she says to my retreating back.

I spend the day catching up on my week and a half out of the office. There is one stalking case, one oil exec’s business trip to Ghana, and one threatening communication which, after paragraphs of murderous rage, ends with, “P.S. - I hope you step on a fucking Lego.”

I highlight the line and forward it to Mom.

“Postscript takes us to Defcon Five,” she texts back. “The agony is real.”

“I think you mean Defcon One.”

“Do I?” There is a pause, during which she is probably googling. “Oh no, you’re right. I always get that one backwards.” The little typing dots burble again, and then a frowny face shows up. “Now my joke is ruined.”

“Excuse me,” Sam says in my doorway. He has a glassbook in his hand, and he looks like he hasn’t slept since I left for Gotham. “Do you have some time?”

“Come take a seat.”

He takes his time setting up the glassbook. He seems to be gathering his courage for something. “I probably wasn’t supposed to do this, but now that I’ve done it I think I have to show you.”

“That’s cryptic. You want to get the team in here?”

He shakes his head hard.

He taps into my desktop drive, and he pulls up schematics on my wall. First he swipes past structural formulas of chemical compounds, and then past spiky spaceships that I recognize as diagrammed viruses. Interspersed with the blocks of text, familiar names pop out at me. Variola major. Ebolavirus. Lassa virus. H1N1.

“Where did you get this?”

He looks downright frightened to tell me. “The secure drive of Kord Industries’ R&D division. It’s a small, shared project, hidden in with their vaccine dev programs. But there was a lot of money disappearing into it. A lot of money.”

I clear my throat. “No one gave us access to any of KI’s secure drives.”

He is concentrating furiously on reading my lips. Then he swallows and says, “No. They did not.”

I’m not yet sure what we’re looking at. “Kord Industries has been developing annual flu vaccines for years now. None of this looks too far out of their wheelhouse.”

“These aren’t vaccines. They’re redesigned viruses. Overclocked. That thing nobody was going to do, because it’s so ridiculously illegal, you know, weaponizing synthetic viruses? I think they did it.”

Kord Industries is a well-established and careful corporation in a heavily regulated industry. Paul Kord is a well-intentioned and careful man. “ _Why_?”

“It’s a government contract. In two weeks, the whole project gets turned over to the CDC. Schematics, passcodes, everything.”

“What’s the CDC going to do with it?”

“They keep smallpox on ice. Maybe this is the same idea.”

This part is hardest to believe: “Paul knows about this?”

“He’s one of six people in the whole company whose names pop up in the access logs. The other five are science-y types. Genetics, viruses, that sort of thing.”

“But in two weeks, he loses access? Kord Industries as a whole loses access?”

“Probably the CDC resecures the entire drive after the transfer, yeah. It’s what I would do.”

I pull the schematic off the wall and scroll through, looking for the name of the project.

Chimera.

“The people who tried to grab Kord weren’t after a ransom. It’s this. They want this.”

  



End file.
